


Bloodlines

by toasterness



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Eldritch Horror, And I'm not sorry, Angst, Blood, Blood and Injury, Body Horror, Cults, Eldritch, Gavin Free Just Wants To Take A Nap, Graphic Depictions Of Everything, Hurt/Comfort, I don't want to spoil too much, M/M, Mystery, Ooze, Original Mythology, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Ryan Haywood Is An Idiot, Ryan Haywood Needs a Hug, Slow Burn, Supernatural Elements, We're Gonna Get Icky Folks, Weird Shit Keeps Happening And Ryan Doesn't Believe, everything is not what it seems, heavily inspired by the magnus archives, kind of, things go very wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:09:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 64,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23790595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toasterness/pseuds/toasterness
Summary: Ryan has always seen the shadows; he's not dumb or blind, just wary of his own sanity. He's not going to stop living his life just because someone new shows up and flips everything upside down. Literally. There's nothing to be afraid of when you close your eyes except your own imagination. And if the shadows have started to see him back, what's Ryan supposed to do? They're not real anyway.This is the story of willful ignorance, physical manifestations of your worst nightmares, and a plot to destroy the world.
Relationships: Gavin Free/Ryan Haywood
Comments: 84
Kudos: 115





	1. New Friends

**Author's Note:**

> Oh hey, it's me again. I was bit by the writing bug and started writing something new. Something big. I'm excited and nervous and ready to fucking GO. We had a big ol' Myan fic, so here's my big ol' Freewood fic.
> 
> I've been obsessed with The Magnus Archives for almost a year now and this fic was heavily inspired by that, along with my fascination with all that is Eldritch. This is my first crack at anything even remotely resembling horror, so be gentle please!

It started when he was little:

Shadows, lurking in corners and under the stairs and even following right behind him, darker than they aught to be and moving when they shouldn’t. Sometimes they had extra pieces that didn’t match the thing they were attached to, and sometimes they were attached to things that they shouldn’t be. He may have been young and full of an overactive imagination but even Ryan knew that these were no mere creations of a child’s mind; they were as real as the bones in his body that would sometimes ache when the shadows got too close.

Ryan had always been a curious child, wandering off when something piqued his interest, no matter the situation or possibility of danger. His foster parents could never keep track of him and would constantly find him caught in some sort of unfortunate situation, or he would take things apart that shouldn’t have been and end up in serious trouble. It was no wonder he never lasted in a home for long.

When he was a little over eleven years old, staying with a nice family near the ocean on the east coast, he watched a massive black bird fly into a sea cave and immediately got distracted from the tide pools they had been looking at; he simply _had_ to investigate – the bird practically called to him. No one even so much as glanced up when he walked away.

The cave only had about eight inches of water and Ryan was tall for his age, so moving through it was no problem at all. He couldn't see the bird but there were loud scratching and slithering noises coming from deeper in the cave so he simply followed them, trudging through the cold surf. The ground felt like it sloped down ever so slightly, the water creeping up his legs the further he went in. He didn’t falter though, just kept moving forward into the ever-growing darkness. The noises kept moving too so Ryan followed.

He had never really been scared of the dark, not like the other kids his age tended to be. On the contrary, he often thrived in it, feeling calm and safe in its warm embrace. This time, however, something seemed off; the pitch blackness was not comforting but cold and clinging. It almost felt as if hands were gripping his arms, pulling him in all sorts of directions. And then the noises had stopped and Ryan was alone, no bird found and nothing but darkness to keep him company, darkness that felt more and more physical the longer he stood there. He was being embraced by hundreds of icy, wet hands. They were stroking his cheeks, sliding along his belly, gripping his legs. It was just the water, he had told himself. But the water felt different, more real than the phantom hands.

It was when the darkness slipped into his lungs that Ryan had begun to panic; he had never been so utterly terrified, fear spiking through him as he desperately turned around and tried to fumble his way back out of the cave. But he didn’t know which direction was which anymore, the pure blackness of the cave overwhelming all of his senses, and he couldn’t get enough oxygen into his lungs to properly focus. He remembers the panic now, mostly, not so much the failed attempt at escaping his own self-made undoing.

Except he hadn’t died then – he’d simply woken up, body lying half in and half out of the surf at the mouth of the cave. He hadn’t been cold though, just wet, and he shook for reasons other than temperature. When he looked back into the cave, Ryan had felt his heart leap into his throat; only twenty or so feet back, the cave ended in nothing but sea-battered rock. A plain white and gray seagull stood staring at him from a small sandbar. His feet couldn’t get him away faster.

Ryan swore up and down that he’d been in that cave for over an hour – and who knew how long he’d been unconscious – but when he found his way back to his foster family, the mother had said _I take my eyes off you for one minute and you manage to get soaking wet!_ Perhaps his sense of time had been messed up or he’d managed to whack his head real good. It was all too much for an eleven year old to handle and he remembers crying, his foster mom tutting kindly and wrapping him in a towel.

He didn’t go back to the ocean for almost fifteen years.

By the time Ryan was seventeen, he was used to the weird shadows and could easily ignore them in favor of willful ignorance. Every now and then he’d find himself staring at one of the stranger ones – the ones that seemed almost to have eyes – but he would always manage to pull himself away, telling himself he needed to get more sleep.

College presented its own problems; he went through three roommates his freshman year, all of them leaving within two months of moving in, each of them suffering from such severe insomnia that it was impacting their health to extreme levels. Ryan had chocked it up to the stress of university and didn’t waste too much thought on it.

But during all four of his years at school, Ryan experienced terrible luck while in the computer labs, his computers completely shutting down without prompting on multiple occasions and never able to turn on again. Other times, even while his fellow students were there with him, every single computer would glitch out and start displaying a black screen with green symbols, kind of like the old DOS software but with a code that no one could recognize, all swirling lines and odd shapes. And when they tried to turn off the computers, they simply would not, even remaining on once their plugs had been pulled. While his classmates would speculate in crazy conspiracies, Ryan went the ‘logical’ route of assuming faulty wiring and moved on with his life.

Things got weirder over time though; the shadows from his childhood remained an ever-present constant in his life but Ryan also experienced other strange occurrences. Like the fog that sometimes wrapped around his ankles in milky white tentacles when he walked home from work on otherwise clear nights, or the large black birds that would sit on his balcony railing and stare straight at him till he got up and scared them off. Unnerving, yes, and unexplainable to anyone else, but he always had an excuse at the ready. Subconsciously, even he knew that he just didn’t want to think he was going mad.

Ryan had just turned thirty when he first saw the man in the black sedan.

He had recently moved to the city, a fresh start in a new place and at a new job dulling the pain of yet another failed relationship. He’d never had much luck in love, partners always claiming one excuse or another for leaving him. They all shared that same aura though, almost as if they were afraid of him, even though he hadn’t so much as raised his voice or said an unkind word to any of them. No matter how many break-ups, they all stung the same, and after this last one he had just decided at that point to start over completely. Nothing like a strange new home to jump-start something better than he’d had before.

So when the woman wearing nothing but seaweed showed up at his door in the middle of the night, Ryan had assumed that she was either the former tenant or was looking for them. Sure, seeing her stand there dripping in his doorway, mouth open wide in a grin filled with too many needle-sharp teeth had definitely unnerved him, but there was always a logical explanation for things, wasn’t there? Clearly she was just lost. Very, very lost.

She had asked him if he’d seen an octopus recently. _About the size of a German shepherd_ , she’d said in a garbled voice, like something was caught in her throat. Ryan had, of course, absolutely not seen an octopus recently, so he told her as such and she just thanked him kindly and walked away. Wet footprints followed her as she descended the exterior stairs to the parking lot below and Ryan couldn’t help but gape after her. She didn’t stop at any other doors.

In the parking lot, a black sedan idled near the road, and when the woman got near, a tall man stepped out of the driver’s side. At least, Ryan thought he was a man – the shadows cast from the streetlights made it hard to get a clear view of the figure’s face. But they were definitely talking to the woman, who showed no signs of distress at the interruption. It wasn’t until she pointed a long finger up to where Ryan stood and the figure looked up that Ryan’s heart stopped and he slammed the door shut. That had for sure been a man’s face, all sharp angles and crooked grin.

In the morning, he played it all off as a dream. A really, _really_ weird dream. But then again, what in his life wasn’t weird?

The next time he saw the man in the black sedan, Ryan was still living in that same apartment. He had been hearing strange noises in his walls for days at that point, subtle scratching and scraping noises that radiated into the ceiling too. Of course, he told himself it was just rats – he didn’t live in the nicest of buildings, after all. But soon it became apparent that if it really was rats, there were way more than were probably healthy for an old structure like his apartment. The noises had increased in volume and source, coming predominantly from the floor above and the upper corners of his bedroom. It was hard to sleep at night when all you heard was the _titch-titch-titch_ of tiny claws and teeth against wood and plaster. So he made the decision one evening to go upstairs to confront his neighbor, a man he knew to be elderly and perhaps wasn’t even aware of the problem.

Except when he knocked on the door, it was a young man who answered – tall, thin, and somewhere in his early twenties. The man wore a white button down shirt cuffed at the elbows tucked into dark fitted pants. He had smiled at Ryan, asking _what seems to be the problem_ in a lilting English accent while simultaneously blocking most of Ryan’s view of the inside of the apartment. What little Ryan could see made absolutely no sense though: the old man standing in the middle of the living room, the floor swarming with rats of all different sizes and colors, the windows wide open and letting in a powerful wind that Ryan himself couldn’t feel from where he stood outside. He had looked at the man in front of him and demanded to know what was going on but he had just said _whatever do you mean_ and when Ryan looked back into the room, the old man was sitting in a reclining chair reading a book and there were no vermin to be seen.

Ryan had excused himself and went back to his apartment where he took a long shower to clear his head. Afterwards, he looked out of his window to see the man get into a familiar dark sedan and drive away. He wasn’t going mad, he absolutely wasn’t going mad.

The scratching never came back.

The third time he saw the curious man, Ryan refused to admit that something was up. He’d gone this far without acknowledging any of it and he didn’t plan on stopping. Didn’t matter that it had been going on for over 32 years – there was absolutely _nothing_ wrong with him and that was that.

It had been in a bar; Ryan didn’t drink but some of his friends had wanted to go out and he had agreed to be the designated driver. He didn’t have many good friends but he felt like it was important to be helpful and kind to those that he did have, even if they were really only work friends. Besides, it was nice to get out once in a while; he wasn’t much for mingling so he rarely got out of the house except for little things like this.

He’d been on his fourth diet coke and really not enjoying himself very much when he saw the man, still wearing the same cuffed white shirt and fitted pants as the last time. He watched as he casually made his way to the bar, this time taking the opportunity to really get a look at him; he was definitely attractive, Ryan had to admit, with his long limbs and lithe muscle. His hair was a soft dirty blonde that flopped a little onto his forehead when he turned and he sported a light scruff that looked remarkably good on his young face. Ryan wasn’t quite sure why no one else in the bar had taken notice of him, especially when he confidently walked right behind the bar, nobody the wiser. With wide eyes, Ryan had watched him grab two very dusty and old looking bottles of what he assumed was extremely expensive liqueur and walk right back out again. And then – and then! – the man had looked directly into Ryan’s eyes and winked – _winked!_ \- before losing himself in the crowd.

Ryan had attempted to follow him but he was unsuccessful. Even when he walked out into the crisp night air at the front of the bar and looked all around, there was no sign of the man. At this point, Ryan had wondered if he had accidentally ordered his coke with rum in it and hadn’t noticed; it would certainly explain him imagining the other man again. After all, he’d always had a very active imagination.

A year later, all of these past encounters and events flashed through Ryan’s head as he watched a man literally _climb up the walls_ of the subway station, no ropes or pulleys in sight.

It had started as a completely normal day; Ryan got up for work, put in his eight hours – and ok, maybe a couple of hours of overtime – and walked to the subway to go home. But then he’d seen a man watching him: grubby, older than him (judging by the wrinkles on his face), and red-eyed. Like, not red around the edges or puffy as if he was sick but really red, irises burning into Ryan’s. He had tried to look away but found that he couldn’t. It wasn’t until the other man had bolted straight at him that Ryan had reacted and even then it was to just fall flat on his ass and watch helplessly as his attacker’s mouth opened wide (too wide) and he lunged. It was then, of course, that the younger man from his past came out of nowhere to stand right in front of him, arms outstretched. Ryan had gaped as the crazed man skittered to the side and then up the walls.

Still sitting on the ground, Ryan looked wildly around, hoping that at least one other person was seeing what he was seeing. As if life was mocking him, nobody had even turned their head in his direction.

“What the _hell_ is going on here?” He demanded of the English man, a little embarrassed at how out of breath he sounded despite not doing anything to warrant it.

Green eyes met blue and the Brit grinned. “Hello again! Fancy seeing you here!” He looked back towards the crawling man, who was now tucked into a corner and hissing at them. “I’m beginning to think you’re following me.”

“Wha-” Ryan fumbled with his words and his limbs as he stood up. “You’re the one who keeps showing up in places that I just happen to be!”

The younger man glanced at him sidelong as he pulled out a surprisingly long knife from a hidden sheath on his hip. “Wouldn’t happen to have a net on you, would you?”

“Don’t change the subject!”

“I’d rather like to think that the bizarre man on the ceiling would be more pressing than discussing our past encounters, wouldn’t you agree?”

Ryan couldn’t decide if he was terrified or angry, so he compromised and went with reluctantly helpful. “No, I haven’t got a net! What kind of question- who would have a _net_?!” He shook his head to clear it a little. “What do I do?!”

Another crooked grin from the Brit. He pointed with the hand not holding the knife, indicating the space directly underneath the ceiling man. “Catch.”

He gave little warning and Ryan barely had any time to think before he was following the trajectory of the now airborne knife as it flew towards the corner. He made it to his destination just as the knife hit its target and the man on the ceiling dropped like a lead weight into his arms. Ryan’s brain kept screaming _what the fuck what the fuck_ and he almost let go but somehow managed to hold on.

With a gurgling cry, the man in his arms thrashed around weakly and Ryan had to quickly set him down on the filthy ground or risk getting injured. Despite the flailing limbs repeatedly smacking him in the arms, Ryan urgently tried to calm the man, tried to hold him down so that he wouldn’t wound himself more on the knife sticking out of his belly. Instead he was shoved back on to his butt again as his quarry struggled even more. He whipped his head around to stare with wide eyes as the English man sauntered over, still with a smile on his face. Ryan was almost distracted by the way his lips curled up a little at the corner. Almost.

“Nice job!” He proclaimed with a light slap to Ryan’s shoulder before grabbing it and helping him up, pulling him backward. “Better stand back though, this part can get a little messy.”  
Ryan turned again, eyes now on the man on the ground, a feeling in his gut that said something very bad was about to happen. “What’s that suppos-”

And then the man shuddered one last time and _exploded_.

There was no smoke or fire or any of the kind of stuff normally associated with explosions; no, instead, blood and viscera erupted outward and splattered all over the subway tiles and Ryan himself. He watched as the knife formerly embedded in the dead guy’s stomach whipped by his head, followed by a soft _caught_ _ya_ from right behind him. The woman standing nearest to him had flecks of crimson all along the back of her otherwise pristine white coat yet she didn’t so much as flinch. It was hot and sticky and Ryan thought he might vomit right there but managed to hold it in. Then the spiders started – they spilled from a now wide open chest cavity, crawling over each other in an avalanche of too many eyes and hairy legs. Ryan gagged and stumbled backwards some more. He had never seen something so monumentally disgusting in his entire life.

A strong arm halted his retreat, wrapping around his upper back and holding him still as he watched the spiders swarm between and over the feet of the completely unaware commuters that still milled around the station. They eventually fell right onto the tracks and disappeared. Ryan took one last look at the mangled corpse on the ground and promptly bent to the side and threw up.

The arm on his back moved so that a hand rubbed circles between his shoulder blades. “Sorry you had to see that.” There was a soft chuckle. “I’m honestly surprised you saw it at all; people don’t usually, uh, _notice_.”

Ryan forced himself to stand up straight again, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and turned to the other man. “ _What just happened._ ”

Despite his life being filled with one weird occurrence after another, this whole situation was one for the books and Ryan was having a hard time even fully registering the events that had just transpired.

“Oh, that?” The younger man jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Mr. Peterson simply got a little too interested in some things he really shouldn’t have.” He chuckled. “Our Lady of the Web doesn’t take kindly to people who don’t know what they’re doing messing around in her business.”

Ryan’s head swam. “Our lady of the – what? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Our Lady of the Web! You know, Mistress of Secrets? Warden of Lies? The Black Mother?”

“I absolutely do _not_ know, actually.”

The other man narrowed his eyes slightly at him. “But I thought you-” He suddenly stood up a little taller, straightening his cuffed sleeves like he wasn’t currently splattered in blood. “I see. My mistake, I was unaware of your, er, inexperience. I simply thought that since I’d seen you before...”

Ryan couldn’t help the small manic laugh that left his mouth. “You thought I was in on this shit.”

“Well, yeah? I have seen you before, right? Has to be a reason it’s always when I’m on a job. Besides, I think I’d remember a face like yours.” He gave another wink and Ryan felt his skin prickle.

“You’re keep up when something freaky happens around me. This is the fourth such time and definitely the craziest.” Ryan paused to wipe away blood that had started to dribble down his forehead and watched as the man briefly looked down in confusion. “Who even _are_ you?”

“Oh, right, I suppose it can’t hurt...” The man tucked his knife back into its sheath (had he really caught that thing out of mid air?) and stuck out his hand towards Ryan. “Agent Free, head archivist of the Omnium Vanitatum.”

For a moment, Ryan thought about not shaking the offered hand; for one, they were both covered in bits and pieces of human, and for another, he wasn’t sure he really trusted this guy. In the end, he reached his own hand out. “Ryan.”

“Well Ryan, it’s very lovely to finally actually meet you! Sorry it had to be in such extreme circumstances.”

“What exactly _is_ the omni – the omni-whatever?”

Agent Free’s smile went crooked again, formal posture forgotten. He walked past Ryan as he answered, crouching next to the corpse and reaching his hands out to search its pockets. “Omnium Vanitatum, The Archives of the Ancients. There’s the tiniest chance you might know us as what the underground media calls us – the Institute of Higher Collections?” When Ryan didn’t respond, he continued. “We collect, er, how do I phrase it...”

From the dead man’s left pant pocket, he pulled what looked like a rusty washer tied on a loop of dirty twine, murmuring a happy little _gotchya_ under his breath. He held it up in Ryan’s direction before putting it in his own pocket and standing up. “Some things are simply not meant to be handled by humans and we go about collecting them. Sometimes we deal with humans that have delved too deep into the occult – like poor Mr. Peterson over there – and sometimes we tussle with the big baddies that go bump in the night.”

Ryan stared hard at Agent Free. Ninety nine percent of his brain believed this man to be completely insane and that the last ten minutes had been another dreadful dream, something his tired mind had cooked up to taunt him some more. He’d had more than enough bullshit happen in his life that he honestly didn’t want to even try to deal with this. But that last one percent – that little voice in the back of his head leftover from a particularly interesting childhood – kept whispering that this was the first time anyone else had ever experienced one of his waking nightmares. He never talked about them to anyone; Ryan kept these things to himself, afraid that he would scare people away. Not like that didn’t happen anyway but that was beside the point.

In the end, it took Agent Free placing his hand back on his shoulder to shake Ryan out of his own thoughts.

“Are you going to be alright?” He asked, genuine concern flavoring his accent.

Ryan huffed out a strained laugh. “I don’t know. I know I shouldn’t be but – this all kinda just fits the bill for me.”

“Right, well, we ought to get cleaned up, don’t you think?” Agent Free dropped his hand to pull out a cell phone. “As I remember it, your flat is quite a bit away. My place is just up the street; you can borrow the shower and I’ll get your clothes in the wash.”

A shiver ran up Ryan’s spine as he glanced towards the body on the ground not ten feet away. “What about him?”

Agent Free held up his phone. “The others will take care of it. Right now I think you deserve a little bit more of an explanation.”

Surprisingly, there was little in the way of resistance from Ryan as he followed the young agent back up the stairs to the street above. His thoughts were so jumbled that he couldn’t even begin to think of a question to start with; who or what really was the web lady? Why didn’t anybody notice anything? How come Ryan could see all of this stuff? He was overwhelmed by everything and his body ached like it had been hit by a car, head still mildly spinning with a tightness in his gut. He just followed the younger man as if it was any other day, knowing full well that he was still covered in blood yet not seeing a single other person pay him any attention. It was entirely disconcerting.

Only three blocks later, Agent Free stopped in front of an old stone building and walked up its front steps. He pulled out a retractable key card from his pocket and held it against a hidden panel till a soft _beep_ could be heard, followed by the front door opening. With a sweeping gesture, he invited Ryan to enter the building first.

It only took Ryan five seconds to tell himself _to hell with it_ and walk right in.

……..

Gavin hadn’t thought today would go anywhere. All of his and Matt’s work had pointed him toward the subway but the last few leads had led them absolutely nowhere; why would this time be any different?Turns out he should have more faith in himself and the Archive’s best researcher. What he absolutely hadn’t expected was to see a (very attractive) man facing down the precise subject he was hunting, eyes wide as the Overtaken rushed at him. Of course, Gavin had stepped in to help – what kind of Archive employee would he be if he didn’t?

What wasn’t quite as surprising – more of a pleasant realization, actually – was that Gavin had seen this man before. Many times, in fact, as he was the same guy that kept popping up during his collection missions. A couple of times, he had even noticed Gavin, which almost never happened; he wasn’t the Archive’s top Agent for nothing. This was a peculiar man, for sure.

Things progressed pretty well from that point on, if he did say so himself. His new companion – Ryan, he found out – was adjusting shockingly wellto all of the crazy stuff that had happened to and around him. Well, maybe not the ‘covered in gore’ part but that really didn’t count. Perhaps it was this fact mixed with Gavin’s ever-present and often troublesome curiosity that provoked him into inviting Ryan to his own apartment, a place where he himself rarely resided (really, what was the point in staying there when the Institute held all of the facilities he might need?). But they both seriously needed a change of clothes and Gavin was nothing if not considerate.

So that’s how he found himself sitting in his sparsely decorated living room waiting for a man he barely knew to finish up in the shower. Gavin had – as anyone with an ounce of hospitality would – set out a set of clean clothes for Ryan, though he was pretty sure the only thing that would fit properly was the pair of rarely worn joggers that he’d stolen from Michael ages ago, back when they were both still in training. He’d grabbed the largest t-shirt he had in his drawers but even that would probably barely fit; Ryan had a much broader chest than Gavin. He should know – he’d been admiring it since he saw the older man at the station.

It didn’t actually take that long for Ryan to finish in the bathroom; soon he was stepping into the hall and making his way into the living room, hair damp and skin still a little pink. He gave Gavin a tired smile as he flopped down onto the couch opposite. And boy, had Gavin been right about the clothing; the pants seemed to be an ok size but the shirt – oh, the shirt was just on this side of almost too tight and it left little to the imagination on the pure definition of Ryan’s pecs. The man worked out, that was for sure.

Gavin was glad that it was his turn to leave the room.

“There might be some soda in the fridge, if you want. Don’t think there’s much in the way of food though.”

Ryan just hummed and leaned his head back against the couch.

“I’ll do my best to answer your questions when I’m done.”

Another noncommittal hum.

Right. Gavin walked to the bathroom, peeling off his blood covered clothes as soon as he closed the door.

When he was finished in the shower and had changed into his own fresh clothes, he padded out into the living room, still rumpling his towel in his hair.

“Right, so let’s have it-” He stopped mid sentence; Ryan was out cold on the couch, mouth hanging slightly open and breaths coming even. Gavin let a quiet laugh slip out. “You and me both, mate.”

With gentle hands, Gavin snagged a large wool blanket from a basket near the window and carefully draped it over Ryan’s sleeping form. The older man didn’t even shift. Gavin took the time to inspect his face, cataloging all the freckles, lines, and scars; he had solid features – strong jaw, angled cheekbones, brooding eyes – but when he slept, Ryan looked years younger than Gavin was sure he was. There was a softness to his mouth that wasn’t there when he was awake. It was a pleasant face to look at.

Gavin never had guests stay overnight – he didn’t have a guest room or even a pull-out couch. It was extremely rare for him to have people over at all, really. Michael and Jeremy were definitely the only ones who had stepped foot inside and that was only a few times and just for a few minutes while Gavin grabbed some things. There was no point since Gavin didn’t treat the place like his home anyway. He didn’t have much in the way of creature comforts, so a simple blanket and a fairly comfy couch would have to do – Gavin sure as hell wasn’t going to wake Ryan up and tell him to get out.

He looked at the time on the microwave: only 8:30. With a heavy sigh, he walked back to his room as quietly as he could and lightly closed the door. Despite the headache that was slowly building at the base of his skull and a general feeling of overexertion, Gavin knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep, never really could after cases like the one he’d closed today; chasing down Overtaken had that effect on him. So instead of pointlessly staring at the ceiling all night, he flopped down onto his bed, pulled out his phone and earbuds, and pressed play on his favorite podcast. He’d check on Ryan in the morning.


	2. Of Shadows And Denial

The sun had barely started to brighten the sky when Ryan awoke with a start.

He was in a strange room surrounded by strange scents and completely and utterly confused as to how he got there. It took him several long moments to recall the events of the day before and then he really wished he hadn’t; his mind flashed back to blood and spiders, two things he was fairly sure he never wanted to see again – at least, not in that volume.

He was wearing clothes that were not his, clothes that didn’t fit quite right but were warm and comfortable. He remembered a hot shower followed by sitting down and leaning his head back on the couch. Sometime in the night, he must have fallen over because now he was laying on his side, head on his own arm like a pillow and facing the kitchen. There was a soft blanket covering his lower body.

There was also a man in the kitchen drinking from a mug and scrolling through his phone.

“Good morning,” Agent Free said without glancing up from his screen. “Fancy a cup of coffee?”

Ryan got up slowly and walked over to the kitchen, taking in the man in front of him; he didn’t look much different from the day before except his clothes weren’t covered in blood and there were very slight shadows under his eyes. _Green,_ he observed, _like ivy._

“Yeah, uh, coffee sounds good.”

Agent Free finally looked up, a smile on his face. “Excellent.” He set his mug down and grabbed an empty one from a cupboard, continuing to speak as he poured the coffee. “I always find that my mornings are better if I manage to have a cuppa before I head to work.”

Ryan took the mug when offered, holding it with both hands close to his chest. “Is your job usually so stressful?”  
“Oh gods, no!” The other man laughed. “There’s far more paperwork than I’d like, for sure. The main sources of trouble I run into are under-motivated interns and insecure filing systems.”

“So you don’t deal with weird shit – with the kind of stuff from, from last night? A lot?”

Once again, Agent Free chuckled. “I may not deal with situations like the one with Mr. Peterson on a regular basis but I can assure you that pretty much _everything_ I work with is, as you call it, _weird_.”

Ryan was quiet for a while. Despite everything, he didn’t feel an ounce of anxiety. He sipped his coffee and stared at the clock on the microwave; 5:23 am. His host went back to reading on his phone and Ryan continued to watch the time. 5:24 am; His mug was half empty now. 5:25 am; His brain filled with a voice whispering _you don’t even know his real name_. 5:26; he set his empty mug down on the counter and cleared his throat.

“Thank you,” he started; Agent Free raised his eyes from his phone. “For saving me yesterday, and for letting me use your shower and lending me clothes. For pretty much everything, really.”

The younger man nodded his head. “Not a problem at all. I’m glad I could assist.”

Ryan couldn’t help but fidget under Agent Free’s gaze; there was something powerful behind it, something calculating and authoritative despite his apparent age. The air in the room started to feel stuffy and Ryan felt like he wasn’t feeling the proper emotions – he was in a stranger’s home and he wasn’t even slightly scared, something that would absolutely not be true for any normal person. He opened his mouth to try and explain himself, closed it, then tried again.

“Look, I don’t usually just accept invitations into random people’s homes-”

“Well, I’m hardly random, am I? We’ve met before, after all.”

Ryan sighed and stuttered through his next words. “Yeah, well, that – those don’t really count.” He raked a hand through his messy hair. “I _especially_ don’t stay the night in stranger’s houses, and despite our, our _incident_ last night, we are definitely still strangers.”

Agent Freecocked his head to the side a little. “Honestly, I wasn’t about to let you wander home after all that; you were dead on your feet! Passed right out, didn’t you?”

A warm flush passed over Ryan’s face. “I-”

“Oh come on, just take the charity, alright? You went through some crazy stuff yesterday.” The other man gestured into the living room behind Ryan. “Your clothes are on the table, feel free to change in the bathroom. I’m sure you want to go home already. Besides! We both have to get to work on time, don’t we?”

Ryan couldn’t argue with that, no matter how much he wanted to; he wanted to stay and ask questions despite his apprehension at being in Agent Free’s home. There was just so much that he wanted to know, about himself, about the agent, about this apparent monstrous being made of spiders. A part of him suspected that this might be his only chance to understand some of the things that kept happening to and around him. And yet, he couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by it all and frankly just wanted to go home and feel some sort of normalcy again. He needed time to collect his thoughts.

He took a deep breath. “Yeah, ok.”

Agent Free smiled politely; some of the carefree friendliness was gone from his face, replaced by a quiet exhaustion that Ryan knew all too well. “I can drive you home, if you’d like?”

“No, uh, that’s alright,” Ryan replied quickly. “I think I’ll grab an Uber or something.”

The other man nodded in understanding. “Bit too soon to be riding the subway again, I gather.”

“I won’t be taking it for a while, I think.”

“Probably for the best.”

Ryan stood there awkwardly for a few seconds before heading to the living room to collect his clothes. He changed in the almost clinically clean bathroom – it was practically empty, a lone toothbrush in a cup and a bottle of shampoo in the shower the only indications that anyone actually lived in the apartment. Once he was in his own clothes (somehow with no indication that they’d been covered in human blood and guts the night before) and had ordered a car to come pick him up, he leaned down to splash some cool water on his face, bracing his hands on the counter to stare at himself in the mirror.

He half expected his reflection to blink or smile or move or _something_ but nothing happened except water dripping off his face into the sink. There was nothing special there, just his tired face, shadows under his eyes as dark as they were the day before, three days of stubble gracing his chin. It was almost a relief. He folded his loaned clothes and set them on the counter.

Back in the living area, Agent Free was waiting with a set of keys swinging on his fingers, eyes still glued to his phone. A crease had formed between his brows.

“My ride’s a minute out,” Ryan said, the younger man’s eyes flicking up and back down at the comment. “So, uh, I’ll be going.”

Agent Free turned off his phone and put it in his back pocket, looking up fully to smile. “I’ll come down with you.” He headed toward the front door, turning off the lights as he went.

Ryan followed him into the hall and the door was locked behind them. They didn’t speak as they made their way back down the stairs to the entrance to the building, where Agent Free held the door open. The light outside was cool and soft, the air crisp with the promise of another clear day. A man stood next to a blue Prius parked along the sidewalk – Ryan’s ride home.

“Well, Mr. Haywood, I hope you have an uneventful day.” Agent Free stuck his hand out for Ryan to take. “I’m sure we’ll run into each other again; we seem to have made it a habit.”

Ryan shook the offered hand. “Thanks again – for everything.”

There was that smile again, the one from the night before, calm and just on this side of cocky. “You’re more than welcome.”

With that, Ryan checked his phone to make sure the Prius was the right car before walking away and getting in. When he looked back to where he had just been standing, his companion was nowhere to be seen.

“All good back there?” His driver asked as he put the car into drive.

Ryan continued to stare out of the window. “Yeah, all good.”

As they drove away, a sudden realization struck him; Agent Free had called him Mr. Haywood but Ryan had never once said his last name. A shiver ran through him.

Who the hell was this man?

……..

As soon as he entered the Archive lobby, Gavin was accosted by people demanding his attention; several interns with questions that could have been answered by other archivists, the main desk clerk with at least a dozen call-back memos, and as many as six of his coworkers attempting small talk. He just wanted to get to his office and file his report, was that too much to ask for? Thankfully, his rescue came in the form of a loud, gravelly voice shouting from in front of the elevators.

“Gavin, where the fuck have you been?” The welcoming form of Michael Jones shoved through the crowd of people around him, ignoring their glares as he made his way over to him. “You’re two hours late, man, Geoff’s been looking all over for you.”

The two of them walked back to the elevators together and Gavin heaved a sigh of relief. “Sorry boy, got caught up in something this morning.”  
Michael gave him an exacerbated look. “Care to explain?”

“I’ll tell you after I file the report,” Gavin responded as he scanned his badge and pressed the button for sub-level four. “Had a real fun time hunting down that Overtaken from the Peterson case.”

The elevator lurched and Michael snorted. “The Black Mother sure does know how to pick ‘em.”

They rode the rest of the way down in companionable silence. Michael had been the first real friend Gavin had made when he moved to the States and they rarely felt uncomfortable around each other. He respected the other Archivist greatly and would gladly tell him all about Ryan and the events from last night as soon as he could get all of his thoughts out in his report. Well, after he spoke to Geoff first, of course.

When the lift finally stopped and the doors opened, Michael turned to him again. “I’ll see you in an hour then? I wanna run over the Iron Crown stuff again before Thursday.”

“Sure. I’ll bring the coffee.”

With a grin, Michael clapped him on the shoulder and walked away down the hallway on their left towards his office. Instead of following him to his own office – the one right past Michael’s – Gavin walked down the short hall in front of him and approached the secretary's desk at the end. The woman sat there didn’t notice his approach, so focused was she on whatever she was typing.

“Morning Linds,” Gavin said cheerily.

The woman jolted slightly and raised her head. Her eyes lit up and she smiled widely. “Mornin’ Gav! Geoff’s waiting for you.”

“How mad is he?”

“On a scale of one to that time you chased down that Veros witch without telling anyone?” She tucked a piece of bright blue hair behind her ear. “I’d say like a three.”

Gavin huffed out a laugh. “Not so bad then.”

“Nah, he was just worried; you usually call when you’re going to be late, and the Peterson case was kind of a doozy.”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

Lindsay’s smile softened. “Well, you better get your butt moving and not keep the boss man waiting any longer.”

Not bothering to knock before entering, Gavin opened the door to the left of Lindsay’s desk and walked into Geoff’s office.

His boss was busy reading over some files splayed across his large desk. The many screens behind him were displaying photos of strangely carved pottery of differing sizes, all of which had a strange black ichor leaking through cracks in their surfaces. The man himself looked frayed at the edges, like he hadn’t slept in days and had been drinking too much coffee again.

“You asked for me?” Gavin said as an introduction. There was no response for several long moments.

Geoff didn’t even bother looking up at him when he finally addressed him. “Missing any limbs?”

“No sir.”

“Still got all your blood?”

“Yes sir.”

“Make any new friends?”

Gavin rolled his eyes and let out a small chuckle; of course Geoff already knew about Ryan. “You could say that.”

Finally, Geoff put down the document that he was reading and stared Gavin down with weary eyes. “I’m trusting that you took care of everything then?”

Gavin pulled the rusty medallion out of his pocked and held it up for Geoff to see. “The Peterson case is as closed as it can be for now. I’ll file my report as soon as we’re done here.”

“Good,” Geoff sighed. “Make sure Trevor gets that thing as soon as possible; I don’t want another Sword of Vices on our hands.”

Gavin shuddered at the memory. “I’ll have Lindsay send it down to him.”

“Right then. Get on with it.”

With that, Geoff went back to looking at his files and Gavin turned back towards the door.

“Oh, and Gav?” He turned around at Geoff’s voice. “Call me next time something like this comes up, ok? You had me worried.”

Gavin smiled guiltily. “I will.”

This hadn’t been the first time that he’d found himself in trouble like this; hell, in the past he’d been cursed out by Geoff dozens of times for loads of worse stuff. Things had improved over the years – Gavin had become better at his job and more responsible in general – but every once in a while, he slipped up. Forgetting to call in when he was running late, especially right after going on a hunt, was a big no-no that he’d mostly gotten in the habit of _not_ doing; he was damn good at his job and took pride in that fact. Disappointing Geoff was bad enough but causing the older man to worry? That was another thing entirely.

Ten years ago, when Gavin had first transferred from the Archive’s companion organization in the UK, he’d been a brand new recruit with no idea what he’d got himself into and Geoff had been the first person to welcome him under his wing, albeit reluctantly at first. But from there they became close, years of tutelage and friendship shaping Gavin into the talented archivist and researcher that he was. He always worked to make Geoff proud of him too, and hated causing him stress that he didn’t need. It’s what he deserved.

Closing the door behind him, Gavin set the medallion on Lindsay’s desk; it thunked down with the sound of something much heavier than it looked.

“To Trevor?” She asked.

“Mhmm. Quick as you can, please.”

Lindsay nodded her head, clicking something on her computer before grabbing the presented object and slipping it into a plastic container she pulled from a drawer in her desk. Gavin knew it would get to where it needed to go, so he left her to it and wandered off towards his office.

Michael’s door was open as he passed; Gavin gave a little wave and continued on till he came to his own door. He scanned his badge to unlock it and enter. Inside, it was a mess; his shelves were overflowing with old tomes and binders of research materials, curio cabinets along his walls were stuffed full of random inert artifacts and knickknacks, and his large oak desk was absolutely covered in loose papers and stacks of files. He didn’t even want to think about the state of his drawers. On the far wall, a bulletin board was covered in a chaotic mix of photographs, sticky notes, and assorted documents. To the untrained eye, it was an unmitigated disaster; to Gavin, everything was exactly where it ought to be.

Unlike everyone else’s offices, his didn’t have a single computer. He blamed the job, as most other electronics in his life outside of the Archives rarely had issues. When it came to work though, Gavin much preferred hard copies of things – he long ago tired of technology failing him at the worst of times, including but not limited to all of his files being corrupted beyond the point of recovery and that time his laptop had been infected by a virulent strain of red fungus sent by the Forgotten Sisters – and could always go to another space in the facility to utilize their extensive network of sources. Matt’s office, for instance, was always a great place to start and the other man kept an extra computer around for him to borrow if need be.

Free of the weight of the amulet he’d given to Lindsay, Gavin sat down at his desk, fully intending on starting his report. Instead, he found himself with his head in his hands and elbows on his desk, practically falling asleep. He wasn’t sure how long he stayed like that but the light sound of someone knocking on door frame startled him alert. Had he really left the door open again?

“You sure you’re alright, Gav?” Michael asked with concern as he entered the room and sat in the chair on the other side of the desk.

Gavin ran a hand through his hair, pushing it back from his forehead. “Just tired, I think.” He rubbed at his face with both hands. “The hunt yesterday really took it out of me, it seems.”

Michael gave him a look. “You didn’t sleep at all again, did you.” It wasn’t a question; Michael knew him too well.

“No,” Gavin responded with a heavy sigh. “Had too much on my mind.”

“Have you filled out your report yet so we can talk or have you been napping since you got in?”

“I wasn’t nap-” The look on his friend’s face stopped him and Gavin grimaced. “No, I haven’t even started my report. But if you want to ask questions, you can stay while I do.”

There was a glint in Michael’s eyes as he propped his feet up on Gavin’s desk, heedless of the papers there. Gavin glared at them but the other man just crossed one foot over the other and smirked.

“So? Care to explain why you were so late? The rookies sent to clean up your mess said everything was all set.”

Gavin spoke as he took a fresh report form out of one of his desk drawers and began to fill out the necessary information. “There was an unexpected, er, interruption, if you will.” He squinted at the section requesting the date. “Is it the fifth or the sixth?”

“Seventh.”

“Shit.” He quickly wrote it down and continued. “Yeah, I had an audience, actually.”

Gavin could hear the surprise in Michael’s voice as he replied. “Somebody _saw_ you?”

“The Overtaken was seconds away from getting its hands on him before I stepped in. Looked more surprised to see me than the poor Mr. Peterson, really.”

Michael laughed. “That’s a new one.”

Gavin hummed in agreement. “Whats even crazier is we’ve seen this guy before. Remember the Rat King case?”

“The one with that old guy down in SoDo?”

“That’s the one. Well, this guy lived in the same complex, I think, and was the one who knocked on the door mid-cleansing.”

“Oh, I remember you telling me about that.” Michael took his feet off the desk and leaned forward. “So he showed up again, huh? This is what, the tenth time he’s popped up?”

Gavin had reached the part asking him for specifics on the encounter, so he gave himself a minute or so before responding. Michael waited patiently till he looked up at him again. “He’s like a magnet for this crap.”

“Definitely seems that way. You say anything to Geoff or Jack?”

“I’ve mentioned it in every report I’ve filed for the cases he’s shown up at.” Gavin shrugged. “I’d say it was just coincidence but you and I both know there aren’t many of those in our line of work.”

Michael laughed again. “There sure as shit aren’t.”

“Anyway, to make a long story short, things got a little messy-”

“Mr. Peterson erupted, didn’t he.”

“-Mr. Peterson erupted, yes, and the poor guy got completely covered in him, head to toe. I couldn’t just leave him to it, could I?”

The glint was back in Michael’s eyes. “You adopted another stray, didn’t you?”

“Since when have I adopted anyone?”

Michael began counting with his fingers, a shit eating grin on his face. “Oh, you know, Matt, Jeremy, Alfredo-”

Gavin cut him off with a wave of his hand. “Ok, ok, I get it. And no, I didn’t _adopt_ him; I just let him use my shower and washed his clothes.”

“Doesn’t explain why you were late this morning.”

“Well, he may or may not have fallen asleep on my couch...”

There was a loud cackle from the other man and Gavin frowned at him. “Oh my god, I can’t wait to tell Jeremy!”

“Tell me what?”

 _Oh, just my luck_ , Gavin cringed inwardly as the other archivist stepped up to the doorway, coffee cup in hand.

“Gav was just telling me how he let a stranger sleep on his couch after he got him covered in people juice.”

Jeremy looked absolutely delighted. “Does Geoff know?”

“No,” Gavin said forcefully. “And I’d be real happy if you left it to me to let him know; I don’t want him breathing down my neck for the next month. I’ve already mentioned said _stranger_ in my report, thank you very much. Besides, I had Lindsay look up his name and information for me last night, so he’s not a complete stranger, is he?”

“But did you include the sleepover part in your report?” Jeremy teased.

With a huff, Gavin slipped the offending document into a manila folder. “Put this in my box, will you?”

Jeremy grabbed the folder and dropped it into the holder on the wall just outside of his office. “This the same guy who keeps showing up on our cases?”

“Yeah. Can’t for the life of me figure out a connection between them though. At least, not one that makes sense.”

Michael stood up and stretched. “Whatever, just have Matt or one of the newbies look into it further, we’ve got shit to do today; Jack sent me some more details on that ‘cursed’ mirror he was talking about at the last all-hands and I still need to work through some of that Iron Crown stuff with you both.”

Following his friends, Gavin stood up too. His limbs felt too heavy and another headache had begun to form right behind his eyes but he knew he didn’t have time to dwell on his exhaustion. He could take a nap when he got off work, maybe just go to bed early.

Before he could exit his office, Michael stopped him with a gentle hand to his chest. “You sure you’re doing alright, Gav? You didn’t push too hard again, did you?”

“I’m alright, Michael, really,” he assured with a small smile. “Just tired.”

His friend looked back and forth between his eyes for a few seconds before nodding once and stepping away. Gavin turned to shut his door and breathed a sigh of relief; no need to make anyone else worry, they all had enough on their plates.

He squared his shoulders and jogged to catch up to Michael and Jeremy.

“So what’s up with this mirror?”

……..

As Tuesdays went, Ryan thought this one had been quite average. Well, as long as you took out the part where he woke up in a strange apartment and had coffee with a mysterious ‘agent’.

He made it to work on time after going home and changing clothes for the second time that day and taking another Uber back into the city. Despite how out of sorts he felt, everything else around him was exactly the same as it ever was. It made him feel a little dizzy, like he was looking at everything from an outsider’s perspective. But, like all the other times something weird had happened around him, Ryan quickly shoved it to the back of his mind and shifted all of his attention to his work.

He was the king of compartmentalizing, after all.

After work, he called another ride and went home. He knew he’d have to start using the subway again soon – his wallet couldn’t handle him not doing so – but he figured he could afford a few more days of avoiding the underground. It would do his mind some good to further distance himself from the memory of the night before.

His initial idea of what he wanted to do that night was maybe play some Destiny or watch something new on Netflix but instead, Ryan found himself sitting at his computer looking up as much information as he could about the Institute of Higher Collections. Searches for the Omnium Vanitatum or Archive of the Ancients turned up little to nothing but there were a few articles about the Institute, conspiratorial blogs mostly but a few of them were actual news clippings, some of which included photographs of a large, intimidating building in the middle of downtown.

The articles were short and usually spoke about the humanitarian and repatriation work the Institute did, how they located stolen artifacts and returned them to their rightful homes, or the large amount of restoration projects they headed. There were no names mentioned, nor was the word ‘agent’ ever used. Except, that is, within the ravings of websites that also claimed that lizard people actually ran the government. These people quoted stories about shifty men in black type agents going around and collecting supposedly haunted objects or hunting down individuals possessed by unknown forces. They even said that there were ancient cults that the Institute worked to take down, that the organization itself had been around for hundreds of years, like some sort of Illuminati.

Ryan had to close his laptop after all of that.

It was the same argument he’d been presenting himself for decades: was he crazy or not? Because finally, after over thirty years, someone else had experienced the madness with him, someone else had seen what he’d seen, so how could it all just be in his head? How did he explain Agent Free and the absolute realness of being covered in blood and gore? That had all happened, it wasn’t some crazy dream or a freaky happenstance. He couldn’t be crazy.

And yet, it all still seemed too unearthly to be real; it was the kind of stuff you read about in Lovecraftian novels, not something you’d ever truly experience. Ryan had been having nightmares his entire life, he knew what they were like, and this was all essentially just the same, no matter how real it felt. Because there was no way it was real. At least, not the way he remembered it.

The whole experience left him feel disjointed, disconnected from his own body. It felt like he wasn’t fully _there._ He was going through a crisis of identity, he knew, but Ryan couldn’t think of a single person he could talk to that could help him work through this. All of his therapists from the past had told him that the things he was experiencing were all in his head and that he needed to focus on that in order to calm down. But how could he do that when nothing at all felt real? How did he separate reality from fiction when they both felt intangible?

He desperately wished that Agent Free had left him his contact info; he was the only person Ryan had any connection to in all of this and his only hope in answering the question about his sanity. He could only wish that the younger man would find him again. Perhaps they would cross paths during another one of Ryan’s nightmares. He’d be sure to ask him his questions then.

Once he was ready for bed, Ryan stared down at his bed trepidaciously; he didn’t feel quite right in his bedroom, he decided, and went back into his living room, shutting the bedroom door behind him. He left on the lights as he curled up on the couch with a large blanket, turning the TV on low before closing his eyes. He dreamed of spiders.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am, as always, available for whatever on [Tumblr](http://toasterness.tumblr.com) so come and yell into the void with me!


	3. Tar In My Veins

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a warning for those who don't like squiggly things: the second half of the chapter involves a bit of slight body horror, so skip the italicized bits if that kind of stuff grosses you out.

Mornings were never Gavin’s strong suit; it took him at least an hour to fully wake up, and he was known to be a bit of a grouch till he’d consumed a minimum of three cups of coffee. He’d gotten better over the years but, as they say, old habits die hard. Things weren’t fairing much better that morning. In fact, Gavin could confidently say that he was feeling just about as shitty as he could, given the circumstances.

It had been three weeks since the events in the subway and he was _tired._ It usually never took him this long to fully recover from a case but here he was, waking up from another unintended nap on his desk. Things were getting out of hand; he could barely stay awake in his meetings, his words were getting mixed up when he was giving instructions to the interns, and he’d found himself staring blankly at his research notebooks countless times. Even the others had started to notice, giving him those concerned looks that he absolutely hated.

These weren’t unusual occurrences – this was how his body reacted when he pushed himself too far – but he hadn’t done that in the Peterson case. Hell, he’d been extra careful to take it easy this time. He’d learned the hard way that ‘burning the candle at both ends’, as Jack called it, was a surefire way to get yourself in trouble.

A knock on his office door startled Gavin out of his introspection.

“Come in,” he called as he rubbed his hands over his face in a poor attempt to wake up.

There was a soft beep, the door opened, and Michael stepped in, a tablet balanced on top of a huge stack of folders in his hands. He set them down unceremoniously on Gavin’s desk, right on top of the two binders containing artifact intake records for the past six months. Grabbing the tablet, he gracelessly plopped down in the chair opposite Gavin.

“Good morning to you too,” Gavin said with a raised brow.

“It’s almost noon, Gav.” There was one of those worried looks again.

Gavin sighed. “Whatever.” He watched Michael fiddle with the tablet for a few moments. “Well? To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

“What, I can’t just pop in on my best friend, check and see how’s he’s doing?”

“Not with that many files, you can’t.”

With a groan, Michael put down his tablet. “They’re the newest batch of potentials; Jack handed them to me at the briefing you _conveniently missed_ this morning.”

“ _Shit..._ ” Gavin must have slept right through it. “How screwed am I?”

Michael shrugged. “Jeremy and I covered for you.”

A huge breath left Gavin as he raked a hand through his hair. “Thanks boy, I owe you guys one.”

“You owe us, like, at least eight at this point.” Michael looked closely at him. “I know you hate hearing us ask but are you sure you’re feeling alright? You look like shit, dude.”

Gavin laughed humorlessly. “Thanks.”

“No, really man, you look like you haven’t slept in days.”

“You know I have trouble sleeping after hunts.”

“Yeah, but you haven’t been on one since you closed the Peterson case. You’re usually better by now.” There was a long pause where Michael just stared at Gavin with a frown. “Seriously Gav, you know you can talk to me.”

Something pulled in Gavin’s chest. “I-” He stumbled over his words, not quite knowing what he wanted to admit. “I’m honestly not sure what exactly is going on with me. I’ve just been out of it since then.”

“Did something happen? Something different than normal?”

“No, nothing.” A quick thought occurred to him. “Well, except my interactions with Mr. Haywood, though I can’t think of a reason why that would affect me in any way beyond building on my existing curiosity.”

Michael smirked. “You think he’s hot.”

“That’s not-” Gavin could feel himself flush. “Yes, objectively he’s attractive but that’s not what I was referring to.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” There was still a glint in Michael’s eyes when he continued. “He’s the repeat offender, right?”

“That’s not the wording I would use but yes, he’s the one I keep coming across while out in the field. Though I still don’t see how he could have anything to do with my extended fatigue.”

A brief silence stretched between them before Michael spoke up again. “Could he be connected to any of the abominations?”

“Well, if is is, he has absolutely no idea about it,” Gavin responded with a shrug. “Poor fellow looked completely blank when I mentioned the Archives and what we do.”

“What.”

Gavin froze; he should not have said that. “Heh, I mean-”

“Gav, did you _tell him_ about us??”

_Shit._ “I, er, may have mentioned something?”

Michael actually looked angry at him, and not the playful anger he teased Gavin with. He shifted so he was seated at the very edge of his chair. “Gavin, you _know_ the rules! You can’t just tell people about us!”

“The public is perfectly aware of the existence of the Institute, Michael, that’s never been a secret-”

“They don’t know anything about what _we_ do though, down here in the lower levels!” Michael pinched the bridge of his nose. “This shit can’t get out, Gav. If Geoff finds out-”

Gavin interrupted, panic clear on his face. “You can’t tell him, he can’t know.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do?! You broke, like, the cardinal rule of the Archives!”

“I-” Gavin heaved in a deep breath. “I couldn’t help myself; he _needed_ to know, Michael. He _saw_ , for christ’s sake! And he’s clearly seen more than just Mr. Peterson!”  
Michael still looked angry but had leaned back into his chair again. “Do we need to bring him in?”

“ _No._ ” The pressure at the back of Gavin’s head was back. “No, he doesn’t need to come in. He’s harmless.”

“You sure?”

Gavin pressed his palms into his eyes. “Not really but I don’t have much to go on at this point.” He looked across at his best friend. “I’ve asked Matt to do a little digging when he gets the chance but he’s been so busy with the Iron Crown research that I don’t think he’s even touched the subject.”

“Well,” Michael began, anger replaced by weariness. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“So you won’t tell Geoff?”

“No, I won’t tell Geoff, but you really should; I don’t want this coming back to bite you in the ass.”

Gavin huffed out a laugh. “I know you’re just trying to look out for me, I just don’t think there’s anything to it. He’s confused, Michael, and rightfully so. I have a feeling that he’s used to weird stuff happening around him and I understand wanting to know more. I just wanted to help him.”

The corner of Michael’s lips turned up just a little bit. “You’re going soft in your old age.”

“Neither of us is even thirty, Michael.”

“Eh, semantics.” He clapped his hands and sat forward towards Gavin. “Ok, so, I actually have something you might be interested in.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, it’s about the Throne.”

Gavin was _very_ interested in whatever Michael had to tell him about the Crimson Throne, actually; he’d been interested in that particular cult for years, spending much of his off-hours meddling here and there, trying to wrap his head around whatever it was they were doing. Most of the other followers of the various abominations and entities that the Archives dealt with were fairly obvious in their intentions and were therefore easier to watch out for.

The Black Mother, for instance, had a devout congregation of people that were constantly attempting to tap into her power, and it had become increasingly easier over the years to predict where they would make their next moves. Those that searched out the Iron Crown were not as easy to spot but they all eventually drew too much attention to themselves and were thwarted. Even the extremely secretive Black Monks – those that worshiped Death itself – could be kept track of at some level.

But the Crimson Throne was a different story. The Archives had been aware of this particular group for centuries, knew that they wanted to bring about what they referred to as The Reconstruction but were, to the Archive’s knowledge, unable to ever do so. They idolized something called the Prince of Slaughter – a heinous entity bent on consuming the world – and desired nothing more than to be destroyed themselves. Their symbol (a sign resembling the number two with three small slashes through its middle) would show up from time to time at locations of ‘paranormal incidents’, yet it was rare to find any concrete evidence of a true Throne presence; they were an enigma, a well-known abomination cult that still somehow kept its true workings under wraps.

In one of Gavin’s more recent cases, he had stumbled upon their symbol carved into the chest of an unfortunate John Doe that was found in the house containing the original artifact he’d been sent to collect. Said artifact had absolutely no known connection to the Throne and Gavin had finally decided to put a little more energy into figuring it all out. He’d asked Matt, the Institute’s top researcher and the only person he trusted to get the job done, to do some investigating when he had time between his other projects. He’d spoken briefly of it to both Michael and Jeremy and any new information was welcome information.

“Yeah,” Michael continued. “Lindsay and I were talking during dinner last night and she told me that Trevor’s been doing some reorganizing down in storage. Turns out, he’s got a mini collection of Throne-signed artifacts. Like, stuff that goes back at least eighty years.”

Gavin’s interest was definitely piqued. “Really? That does sound like something I’d like to see. How did Trevor know to look out for them?”

“Dunno, I think he’s just really good at his job, and damn thorough. Probably noticed the symbols while going over them for categorization.”

“That’s definitely something he’d do.”

Michael laughed. “You know how he is with his details and patterns.” He messed with his tablet then flipped it around to show Gavin. “Anyway, thought you aught to know that over seventy five percent of them were marked with blood.”

On the tablet were dozens of images of various pieces of clothing, ceramics, weapons, books, and more, cycling through every few seconds. Sure enough, the majority of the symbols were written or carved in a deep red color, the same patterned spiral occurring over and over in differing styles and clarity. Some were clean and orderly, some were like identical stamps, and even more were clearly marked with the quick strokes of a finger or brush. How they had never been noticed before was lost on Gavin.

“Could you send those to me?”

“To what computer?” Michael said, looking pointedly around the room.

Gavin hummed. “I can check my email on my phone, thanks. Actually, send it to Matt too; he might be able to use this.”

Michael tapped a few times on the tablet’s screen before setting it back on his lap. “Done. Now, do you have time to look these over with me? Jack wants our opinions by lunchtime.”

A low groan slipped out of Gavin’s throat as he let his head roll back against his chair. Potentials were his least favorite bits of busy work; they were boring and almost never held anything of value. He reckoned only one in twenty of the reports would lead to anything actually worth their time, and even then it was more than likely that it was something that could easily be handled by one of the rookies. Maybe it was just him being petty but Gavin and his team were the best of the best and he didn’t feel the need to be wasted on simple item pick-up cases.

With a trademark heavy sigh, Gavin picked up the first file: someone claimed to have seen Wolfman in a park downtown.

“This is going to be so much fun.”

Michael cackled and grabbed another folder.

……..

_He was walking on the beach. It was dark but there was no moon in the sky._

_When was the last time he’d been to the ocean?_

_The wind blew harshly at his bare skin; he wasn’t wearing a coat. It was silent but for the rushing of air, the steady rumble of the waves crashing to shore, and the dull but constant beating of his heart. The sand was cold on his bare feet. He’d been to this beach before, a long time ago._

_He hated the ocean, why was he here?_

_His body took him onward, pulled by an invisible force from somewhere beyond his rational thoughts. He couldn’t have stopped even if he wanted to. He kind of did but more of him wanted to keep going, to see where this force was taking him. He had always been too curious for his own good._

_And then the silence was broken by voices. Quiet voices, barely audible over the noise of the_ _sea_ _but still very much present. It was difficult for him to understand what they were saying, their words just out of reach, or perhaps in a language he couldn’t understand. They felt familiar, almost, like a far distant memory that he’d long put aside. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d purposefully forgotten something. And still he walked._

_After the voices came the hands._

_He knew these hands, had felt them ages ago when he’_ _d_ _first learned to fear the ocean._ _They were made of shadows and were indistinguishable from the blackness of the night surrounding him. But he could feel them, oh so intimately, sliding up and down his exposed limbs like a lover might, though lacking any true emotion. Except maybe hunger,_ _b_ _ecause he could_ _sense_ _it_ _tempering the air somehow. He felt it now too, deep in the pit of his stomach – a gnawing, aching hunger that_ _somehow_ _also felt familiar._

_And still he walked._

_The vaguest of ideas came to him then: there had to at some point be an end to this beach. He had been walking for hours, days, weeks, but had yet to reach it. Was that the point? Was he meant to continue walking forever with only th_ _is hidden_ _touch as company? It was, he supposed, somehow what he deserved. He’d tried to be good in his life but maybe he had made a misstep somewhere and that had led him here, walking forever and ever along a cold, dark beach._

_The voices rose ever so slightly, enough that he could clearlyhear the words being spoken; he still couldn’t understand the language yet it made perfect sense. He stopped walking._

_Immediately the darkness wrapped even tighter around him. Like when he was a child, it slid along his skin and dripped into his pores._ _This time though, h_ _e didn’t hesitate to open his mouth and let the inky blackness_ _slither_ _past his lips and into his throat,_ _spilling into his stomach and lungs_ _. Unlike before_ _when it had filled him with terror_ _,_ _this time_ _he welcomed it,_ _reveled_ _in the feeling of drowning_ _. It_ _was soft and gentle and_ _felt like coming home._

_Soon his_ _whole body_ _w_ _as_ _filled with the darkness._ _I_ _t had wormed its way into his tear ducts an_ _d slipped up his nose_ _._ _It was in every piece of him, melded with his organs and his bones and his very soul. For once in his life, he felt complete. He was at peace; no fear, no anxiety, just total and all encompassing_ _wholeness_ _._

_It was strange, to feel this way while being_ _totally and_ _utterly consumed. Nothing was in his control and yet everything felt so good. Every nerve in his body was on fire in the most delicious of ways and he never wanted to leave the comfort of the dark._

_And yet._

_Something sparked in the back of his mind. Everything was so pleasantly foggy and amorphous but he still felt it and was, as always, curious. So he willed his mind to pluck that little idea from the slowly dissolving abyss that was his subconscious and bring it forward. What he found was distressing; this tiny thought said that none of this was right, that he should not be happy or content because he was being destroyed. This was not meant to be happening._

_All of a sudden the blackness didn’t feel good anymore; instead of the_ _comforting_ _thrum of_ _the shadows slinking inside his veins, he felt jagged edges being dragged across his insides. His lungs burned burned burned and he discovered that he did not, in fact, like not being able to breathe. He choked on what now felt like a slimy tentacle being shoved down his throat, gagging hard enough to bring bile up from his rebelling stomach. He thrashed against the hands that were no longer gently caressing him but were gripping hard enough to bruise and felt like they were trying to rip him apart._

_Everything hurt. Why, why had he let himself so fully surr_ _ender_ _? Why had he welcomed this evil into himself? His head was no longer fuzzy or numb; he was filled with disgust and hatred and overpowering fear. He was overcome with the need to run but he couldn’t; he was still being restrained by the darkness, still suffocating around the thing in his throat. He tried to cry out but nothing left his lungs, not even the barest of sounds._

_The voices had risen to a crescendo, a cacophony of words jumbled together and echoing inside his head. They yelled and yelled and yelled and –_

Ryan woke up screaming. His arms and legs were tangled in his sheets and his throat felt raw, like he’d been yelling for hours. Sweat drenched him from head to foot, puddled in the dips of his collarbones and soaking his hair, and he was panting as if he’d just run a marathon. With violently shaking hands, he touched his face, certain that he would feel that _thing_ from his nightmare still on his skin but finding nothing except damp stubble. His stomach lurched and he barely had time to leap from his bed, open the bedroom door, and stumble into the bathroom on unstable legs before violently throwing up into the toilet, his body forcefully evicting anything and everything in his stomach.

It took a while for it all to come up and by the time he was finished, Ryan’s head was pounding and the trembling in his body had only increased. He stood up slowly, using the sink counter as support, and flushed the toilet without looking at its contents. It took a long minute for him to build up the courage to turn on the light. Once he’d adjusted to the sudden brightness, he met his own eyes in the mirror; they were bloodshot, with dried tear tracks lining his face.

“It was just a nightmare,” he whispered hoarsely to himself. “Just another nightmare.”

He was about to turn the sink on and get a drink of water when he saw it – a small dribble of black ichor leaking from the corner of his mouth.

Ryan made no sound as he collapsed to the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know the drill by now: fine me on [Tumblr](http://toasterness.tumblr.com)


	4. The Sanguine Library

Waking up on the floor of your bathroom is never a good thing. Ryan had never been a drinker, even in college, but he’d had friends that told stories of head-splitting hangovers and camping out next to the toilet for an entire day after a night of drinking, so he thought he had a pretty good idea on the subject despite never had experienced it. He imagined that it felt an awful lot like how he felt right now.

There was a huge chance that he’d hit his head fairly hard on the ceramic tiles because wow, his head was pounding and his left cheekbone ached something fierce. The crusty feeling of dried drool at the corner of his mouth had him wetting his skin with his tongue and wiping it away with the back of his hand, which he promptly scrubbed off on his pajama pants; it left a bitter taste in his mouth. He had no idea how long he’d been out but he could see the sun shining brightly into his living room. _Probably late for work_ , he though. _Going to have to call in sick again._

Standing on wobbly legs, Ryan checked himself out in the mirror: a light bruise had blossomed next to his left eye and he looked a little paler than usual. Other than that there didn’t seem to be much else different about him that he could see. There was the vaguest memory of a weird dream from the night before but he couldn’t fit any of the pieces together so he just dismissed it. He must have been really sick.

Back in his bedroom, the alarm clock read 9:37 in bright red numbers. Ryan groaned loudly; he was definitely going to have to call in from work and make up some sort of plausible excuse. He wondered if they’d accept the truth – that he’d simply passed out from exhaustion or illness, whatever it was – or if they’d take that as him having gone on some crazy bender and blacked out. In the end, he went with a quick call to the office to let them know that he was experiencing severe vertigo but had made an appointment with a doctor. The man on the other end of the line didn’t say much, just asked for his details and told him to bring in a doctor’s note whenever he returned.

Which, ok, not so good. Now Ryan groaned for a whole other reason – he was going to actually have to go see a doctor. Well, at least he had the rest of the day off. He wondered if the urgent care down the street would be available to see him. It might actually do him some good, now that he thought about it; maybe they could shed some light on why he had passed out, or perhaps even recommend something for his insomnia and nightmares. It had been a while since he’d been in to see a therapist, so it couldn’t hurt to ask.

He took his time eating breakfast. Normally Ryan rushed through his morning routine, his usual breakfast consisting of a bagel with cream cheese and coffee in a cheap reusable travel mug as he hurried to catch the subway three blocks down from his apartment. Today he made himself a luxurious meal of eggs on toast. Normally he took his quick showers at night but this morning he stood under the scalding spray till the water ran cold, scrubbing every inch of his skin till it was bright pink. He didn’t know why but he’d felt just a little dirtier than normal, like he was covered in a thin layer of grime, and the need to be _clean_ overruled his desire to save money on his water bill.

Despite relatively enjoying his job, Ryan really didn’t like wearing all of those nice clothes; he didn’t feel right in slacks and button up shirts. He was most comfortable in jeans and a T-shirt, and a zip up hoodie if it was chilly. With a small smile, he pulled out his favorite of each of these and got dressed to go to the clinic. Best to get it all over with so he could relax the rest of the day.

It was a beautiful day outside, sunny and warm with a light breeze. People bustled all around him as he strolled unhurried down the sidewalk. Ryan was so used to rushing everywhere that it almost felt wrong to be moving so slow. There wasn’t enough energy in his body to move at his normal pace yet there was something in the air that made him feel the tiniest bit anxious, like he was forgetting something important but hadn’t the foggiest idea what it could be. He found himself tucking his hands into his jacket pockets and folding slightly in on himself to prevent anyone from bumping into him.

The urgent care wasn’t too far from his apartment so he reached it in about ten minutes. The woman at the front counter looked disinterested as he checked in, handing him a clipboard with some forms on it to fill out. Ryan sat in one of the small, uncomfortable chairs in the waiting room and wrote down the necessary information. When it came to the part asking him to describe his symptoms, he paused; what _were_ his symptoms exactly? He’d told his work that he had vertigo but that wasn’t really true. He suspected that he must have it last night and that was the reason he had fainted, though he had no actual memory of the events that transpired between going to sleep in his bed and waking up on his bathroom floor. On the form, he wrote ‘ _random fainting_ ’ and ‘ _memory loss_ ’.

Twenty minutes later, he was called into a small exam room where a nice older lady took his blood pressure, pulse, and temperature. She made small talk with him about this and that, typing away at her computer, and then left him to wait for the doctor. It took another fifteen minutes for him to show up.

The doctor was middle aged with slightly graying hair and kind looking eyes. He washed his hands and dried them before shaking Ryan’s hand, introducing himself as Dr. Richards.

“So! What’s brought you into my humble little clinic today?” He asked as he flipped through his charts.

Ryan hopelessly looked at the pages that he’d already written in. “I, uh, woke up this morning on my bathroom floor and don’t remember how I got there.”

“Hmm,” Dr. Richards said, looking up at Ryan and setting down the chart. “Has this ever happened to you before?”

“No.”

“Do you have a history of memory loss or fainting spells?”

“No.”

“Are you feeling any vertigo?”

“Not really.”

Dr. Richards stood up and took out a pen light from his lab coat pocket. He began shining it into Ryan’s eyes. “Do you have a headache?”

“I did earlier but it’s gone now.”

Now Dr. Richards was gently touching the bruise under Ryan’s eye. “Must have landed face first. I wouldn’t worry about it though, the bruise will fade in a couple days and it doesn’t look like there’s too much damage.” He stood back again and put in his stethoscope earbuds. “Doesn’t appear you have a concussion, which is good.”

He put the body of the stethoscope on Ryan’s chest, right about his heart; Ryan took a deep breath in. Dr. Richards re-positioned to listen to both lungs, then onto his back before stepping away again. As he put his stethoscope away, he looked at Ryan with a critical eye.

“Do you take any drugs, Mr. Haywood?”

Ryan blanched. “What? No, none.”

“Not even for sleep?”

“None.”

Dr. Richards tilted his head slightly, taking out the little devise meant to look into ears and noses and continued his examination. “Hmm. Do you have a history of sleep walking?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Any family history of sleep issues?”

“I was a foster kid,” Ryan explained and Dr. Richards nodded in understanding. “I’ve had insomnia for as long as I can remember though.”

Dr. Richards sat back in his chair and sighed, typing in his observations into Ryan’s digital file. “Well, I can’t be sure of much without a CT scan or an MRI but I don’t think this is serious enough to warrant something that extreme, especially since this is the first time something like this has happened to you.” Ryan hummed in agreement. “I can, however, try to treat your insomnia, as I suspect that has something to do with it. I think you experienced a little sleep walking and your body just wasn’t used to it, so it collapsed. Patients who don’t get enough sleep often find that they forget things a lot easier and can start developing these kinds of symptoms.”

“What do you suggest I do?”

“You could try a sleep aid – I recommend melatonin for right now since it’s a more natural, gentler supplement – and move up from there if that doesn’t work.” He scribbled something down on a prescription pad and handed it to Ryan. “Here’s a recommendation for a good sleep doctor downtown if you’re interested.”

Ryan sighed internally. “Thanks, doc.”

“I also think you should get yourself an air filter for your bedroom – you’ve got some dark dust particles in your nose and collected in your tear ducts. Your lungs sound fairly good but there’s just a little shakiness when you breathe deeply. The cleaner air will also help you sleep better, so that’s a win-win.”

A sick feeling filled Ryan’s gut; why did that make him so worried? Images of black slime flashed across the backs of his eyelids and he cringed inwardly.

“I think I can manage that,” He told the doctor.

“Good! And if this happens again, give that sleep doctor a call and see if you can get in to see her.” With that, Dr. Richards stood up and offered his hand to Ryan once again. “Alright Mr. Haywood, take care of yourself.”

Ryan stood up too and shook his hand. “Thank you.”

And then the doctor was gone and Ryan was standing alone in the exam room. He took a final deep breath before exiting and walking back to the exit. It felt good to be outside again; Ryan had begun to feel kind of claustrophobic and the cool breeze felt good on his skin. He started walking home with an increasing urgency that he hadn’t had on his way there.

It wasn’t till he reached the front door to his apartment that Ryan felt the tell-tale lurch in his stomach. His mouth was watering by the time he’d unlocked the door, entered, and shut it behind him. He practically ran into the kitchen to grab the garbage bin under the sink and promptly threw up the entire contents of his stomach into it. It tasted acidic and oily.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he whispered under his breath.

He was scared to open his eyes and see what was in the garbage; a fear he couldn’t explain gripped his whole body. Eventually, Ryan forced his eyes open. Inside the bin, coating the original contents, was a layer of slimy black bile. His stomach made a valiant effort to throw up again but it just ended in a dry heave. What the hell was wrong with him?

Ryan’s hands trembled when he pulled the bag out of the bin and tied it up. He was in a daze as he left his apartment again to drop the bag into the dumpster in the parking lot just below his walkway. This feeling of floating remained as he went back inside and re-locked the door. The water he gulped down next sat heavy in his stomach.

“You’re just sick,” he told himself. “Really sick.”

Sleep, he needed sleep, right? Isn’t that what everyone says you need when you’re ill? Ryan didn’t really feel up to sleeping though. To be honest, he felt like punching a wall, or burning himself in another too-hot shower. As a compromise, he changed into a pair of sweats and an old college shirt, wrapped himself up in his blanket on the couch, and mindlessly put on a random Netflix documentary. He stayed like that all day, drinking only water and eating nothing, afraid he’d just vomit it all up later. The only time he went into his bedroom was to change and then the door remained shut.

Ryan slept fitfully that night, never deep enough for dreams, and only went back into his room once light was shining through his windows and he needed to get dressed for work. When he got to the office, his coworkers asked him offhandedly how he was doing and he lied and said he was _feeling much better now, thank_ _s._ But in reality he felt like complete dog shit; he was exhausted, hungry, and there was a constant pressure behind his eyes. Every time his mind wandered to black slithering things, he forced himself to concentrate on something, _anything_ else, throwing himself into his work. When he got home, he didn’t even bother with food before returning to his spot on the couch.

From then on, Ryan never slept with the lights off again.

……..

Gavin finds the book in the library of an eccentric millionaire, because of course he does.

A little over a month had gone by since the incident on the subway platform and he and Matt had finally tracked down the source of all the Black Mother-related Overtaken that had been causing issue in the city for the past year. The mission was simple, really: gain access to the man’s lavish home in the middle of a forest several hours outside downtown, confiscate the music box that continuously played ‘The Itsy Bitsy Spider’ on repeat, and get the hell out. Everything went a lot easier than expected though – the owner of the mansion had been dead for what looked like at least several months. Gavin found the music box lodged inside his rotten and spiderweb-filled chest cavity.

The library had been a second thought; it was rare that he had access to such a collection outside of the Archives themselves and Gavin figured it couldn’t hurt to peruse the selection before he headed out. Turns out that was a good idea because the old man had clearly been a fan of the occult, amassing a huge variety of material on subjects varying from Eldritch horrors to ancient spiritual medicine. It was actually the copy of _The King in Yellow_ next to it that caught his eye first but he was quickly distracted by this new volume.

 _Ath-thogail an Saoghal_ was printed in curling green script on the delicate black leather cover. It was thick, probably several hundred pages long, and looked as if it hadn’t been opened in many years, its pages lined with dust and rusty yellow in color. No author was mentioned but what really interested Gavin, what made him snatch the book right of its shelf, was the small symbol etched into its spine in the same green scrawl:

Something resembling the number two with three messy slashes going right through the middle.

Now, the Archive was good – _really_ good – at maintaining a selection of resource material that would put all other collections to shame. Inside its walls were two libraries; one on the upper floors for regular cases, and the other deep underground where all of the ‘abnormal’ assets were kept. This was where Gavin spent most of his time during his research, where dozens of books and other documents dealing with the Abominations and their followers could be found. Hell, Gavin himself had at least four _Necronomicons_ stashed somewhere in his office alone. And both libraries grew in size every year as new information was gathered and more case journals were filed.

But there were no books on the Crimson Throne, at least none that weren’t written by Archive staff. Gavin had combed through every single item they had on the subject and come out with only a few notebooks describing certain case files where the symbol had appeared. A past archivist’s journal from 1846 mentioned the Reconstruction by name but any and all source material was lost or destroyed. The Prince of Slaughter left no guidebook to follow, no clues to his plans, just little taunting fingerprints in the form of his emblem scattered about the world.

Yet here was this book, clearly marked by the Throne, nestled away in the exact kind of library you’d expect it to be – it was almost too good to be true. With gentle hands, Gavin carefully opened it to the first page. There was that strange title again, this time in black, still with no author listed. He carefully turned to a few sections and saw page after page of detailed script and charts, macabre illustrations adorning half of them. The paper was well-worn and soft to the touch, though much of the ink was severely smudged throughout and the majority of the inside was heavily water damaged. But in his hands, the book practically _hummed_.

Gavin had felt the power radiating from the book the moment he touched it; it made his eyes sting and his stomach roil, and every page he turned triggered a small tremor in his hands or a tingle up his spine. He knew, without a doubt, that it was pure evil and needed to be taken back to the Archives at once. Only there could it be safely examined.

Taking a picture with his phone, Gavin sent a message to Matt asking to translate the title. Within minutes, he received a call.

“ _Rebuild the World._ ”

Gavin paused, momentarily confused. “Pardon?” He could hear Matt sigh heavily.

“ _The book’s title, it means Rebuild the World._ ”

“That makes a bit of sense,” Gavin responded while looking back at the symbol on the book’s spine. “It’s got the Throne’s mark on it.”

“ _Oh. The Reconstruction?_ ” Matt had always been so quick on the uptake.

“Yeah, I suspect so.” Gavin tucked the book in his backpack alongside the creepy music box. “What language is it?”

The sound of typing could be heard coming from the other end of the line. “ _Scots Gaelic,_ _probably the really old kind_.”

“Right, well, I’ll be back in a few hours; we can take a closer look at it then. Judging by what I’ve seen so far, I think we finally found something concrete.”

“ _See you in a bit_.”

Gavin hung up the phone and tucked it into his pocket. Slinging his backpack over his shoulder, he made his way back outside to where he’d parked the shiny black sedan loaned to him by the Institute. He gave his bag a wary look before unlocking the trunk and placing it in there; no sense in keeping a definitely super evil book right next to him while he drove home. It was better to be safe than sorry. Or in this case, possibly possessed by some otherworldly entity bent on devouring the world.

The drive back to the Archives went by much quicker than the trip to the mansion. Gavin could feel his anticipation building the whole way there; he wanted to take a further look at the book so bad, desperate to translate its pages and learn more about the Crimson Throne. It wasn’t often that a new source book was discovered and Gavin _needed_ to get whatever information it had hidden away. He’d been looking for something like this for literal years.

Matt looked just as excited once Gavin finally arrived down in the Archive’s research hub three hours later. The book was taken out of the backpack and gently placed on top of the main artifact examination table where the two of them could use the bright lights attached to it to take a closer look at the damaged pages. They both put on nitrile gloves, leery of the damage their hand oils could do to such an old book. Gavin grinned up at his counterpart.

“Lady’s first!”

“Shut up, Gavin.”

They ended up working through the night, totally ignorant of the amount of time passing. Photographs were meticulously taken of every single page and sketches were made of the many charts and diagrams. Gavin took notes in a brand new journal and Matt wrote sticky note after sticky note that he stuck to the whiteboard next to them on the wall. Much of their time was spent on painstakingly transcribing various interesting-looking sections, the ones that could be distinguished among all of the damage. By the time they were done, Gavin’s hands ached and he could see Matt practically falling asleep on his feet.

“I think we should call it a night,” he suggested.

Matt blinked slowly at him, then looked at his watch. “Uh, how about morning? It’s 4:16.”

“Huh.”

“Think I’m gonna head home. I’ll leave a note for Lindsay to let her know I’ll definitely be coming in late today.”

Gavin nodded his head in agreement. “Yeah, that does sound lovely. You go on and head out, I’m going to get this thing put away and make a few more notes.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. Get some sleep.”

Matt gave him a knowing look, shrugged, then walked towards the door, throwing out his gloves along the way. “Don’t stay too much longer!” he shouted over his shoulder.

But Gavin, like he so often did, ignored all of that and didn’t go home. Instead, he grabbed his journal and the book and headed to his office. He wanted to get as much of it translated as he could, as soon as he could, so why waste time with sleep? It wasn’t like he was that tired anyway – he’d gotten used to the seemingly permanent fatigue he’d been feeling since the Peterson case. So he sat at his desk and worked, heedless of the time passing once again. He didn’t even look up from the foreign pages till a cup of coffee was deposited none to gently on his desk in front of him.

Gavin stared at the white lid and cardboard sleeve for a few seconds before fully registering what was going on. When he looked up, the frowning face of his best friend was glaring down at him – he should have never added his ID into the door’s security system.

“What the fuck, Gav,” Michael growled in his typical morning voice. “Matt sent me a text; you were supposed to _go home_.”

Without a good enough excuse, Gavin stayed silent. He picked up the coffee and took a sip – double shot latte with a hint of vanilla. His eyes closed and he hummed in pleasure.

Michael said something under his breath that sounded a lot like _dumb motherfucker_ but he still sat down across from Gavin. “You’re burning the candle at both ends again.”

“You know I usually stay here overnight,” Gavin retorted, voice void of any actual ire. “What’s to say I didn’t take a nap?”

“Because I know you, Gav, and you’re the kind of idiot who works himself to the bone without any care for his own well-being.” Beneath his gruff exterior, Gavin knew Michael to be one of the most protective and loyal people he’d ever met; this was all coming from a place of genuine concern. “Really man, this isn’t good for you.”

Gavin sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I know, I know.” He slid the book closer to his friend. “But I found this yesterday and I couldn’t stop trying to get through it...”

Michael leaned forward in his seat to take a look, eyebrows pulled together. “Ath tho gail on seagull?”

“ _Ath-_ _t_ _hogail an Saoghal,_ ” Gavin corrected with a small laugh. “It’s ancient Scots Gaelic.”

“Course you would know how to pronounce it, fuckin’ English prick...”

Ignoring him, Gavin continued. “Matt and I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of things but without all of it being translated, we can’t be sure. I stayed because I wanted to get more done – it’s a lengthy process. You can see the pages aren’t in the best shape.”

“Looks like the damn thing was dunked in dirty water.” Michael said while gently using a pen to turn a few pages.

“It’s definitely been through a lot, probably quite a few years old too. No date though, or author.”

Michael looked closer at a page with a drawing of what could only be described as a mutilation ritual. “These look hand drawn.”

“That’s what we think too. The actual script changes throughout the book as well, so we suspect that it was all done by hand, and possibly over a long period of time by different people.” Gavin used his gloved hand to turn to the back of the book. “Notice how these passages aren’t as damaged?”

“They’re newer,” Michael answered with a low whistle. “Added towards the end. Nice catch.”

“Yes, well, that’s all well and good but I can’t seem to figure out what it all _means_.”

The smile Michael gave him was small but kind. “You’ll figure it out – you always do.”

“Thanks, boy.” Gavin took another sip of his latte. “And thanks for the drink.”

“It was Lindsay’s idea but I’ll let her know you appreciate it – I just wanted to grab you a black coffee but she insisted you’d need a pick-me-up.”

A rush of affection for the woman filled Gavin. “You really lucked out with that one, Michael.”

“And don’t I know it!” Michael rose from his chair with a laugh. “Now, don’t think that just because you didn’t sleep last night that you can skip the meeting this morning; Jeremy and I aren’t going to keep making excuses for you.” At Gavin’s responding groan, Michael smirked. “You can always skip again and deal with Geoff later-”

“Ugh, no, fine, I’ll be there!”

Michael chuckled as he left the office, leaving the door wide open. “See you in twenty!”

Once his friend was gone, Gavin closed the _Ath-_ _t_ _hogail an Saoghal_ and placed it on the middle of his desk, throwing his gloves away after. He stood up and stretched (his joints crackled and there was a sharp ache in his lower back), grabbed his coffee, and walked out into the hall, closing the door behind him. Michael was right; he needed to take better care of himself and that started with heading to the break room to quickly wash his face in the sink and down an entire glass of water. He sent a quick _thank you_ text to Lindsay before making his way to the conference room where the all-hands meeting would be taking place. Gavin figured that in order to not risk missing another meeting, he might as well get a few minutes rest in the room itself. The others would rouse him when they arrived.

He sat in the seat far towards the back, nestled in the corner, not bothering to turn the lights on. It was his and Michael’s usual spot and allowed him the best view of everyone. Carefully setting his latte on the floor next to his chair, Gavin let his head rest back on it and closed his eyes. Exhaustion immediately pulled at the edges of his mind and he found himself drifting off, the soft thrum of the air unit above him lulling him into sleep.

All too soon, voices greeted him and the bright florescent lights woke him up. Gavin flinched when he opened his eyes and watched as several other Archive staff members filed in. He picked his drink back up off the floor as Michael and Jeremy came soon after and joined him in the corner, discussing something or other about the Iron Crown. Jeremy gave him a friendly pat of the shoulder in greeting and Gavin smiled in return. Within a few short minutes, the room was full and Geoff and Jack had taken their spots at the head of the table. And even though Gavin knew he should be paying attention, knew that it was important information that was being shared, he couldn’t help but feel himself dozing off again and again. Michael kept kicking his chair to get him to focus

It was going to be another long day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know the drill:  
> [toasterness](http://toasterness.tumblr.com)


	5. Safety And Other Such Lies

If Ryan had his way, there would be no such thing as freezing rain.

Now, it wasn’t like he didn’t like the rain, or ice, or even cold weather in general; on the contrary, he enjoyed winter and he love thunderstorms. But there was just something about the way frozen rain seeped into into his clothing and chilled him to his bones, so cold that even a hot shower had a hard time warming him up, that really put it in a whole other category of awful weather.

It just so happened that today of all days he’d forgotten to grab a rain coat or an umbrella even though the weather man had said that morning that a storm would roll in around 6:00 pm, and then he’d agreed to take on a few extra projects at the end of the day _knowing_ that he would have to walk out in said storm. It wasn’t until he was standing at the front door of his office building three hours after he was supposed to go home, staring out at the icy torrent spilling from the dark sky, that Ryan fully realized his mistake.

“Fuck.”

The instant he stepped outside, Ryan was soaked through. His work jacket didn’t stand a chance against the frozen onslaught. It was only a few blocks to the subway station but even that was almost too much for him to handle. He ran the whole way there but was still shaking violently by the time he reached the platform. Several other commuters glanced at him in pity.

Two months had passed since the incident with Agent Free and Ryan was mostly over his fear of the subway. He probably would never lose it entirely but his need for cheap transport was more pressing than his anxiety over weird spider-infested people. He knew – or rather, really really hoped – that everything from that night had been a complete fluke and that he wouldn’t experience something like that again. Well, at least for a very long time; he could never truly escape the strange and odd, could he?

Even though it was later in the evening, there were still several other people riding in the subway car with him. Ryan kept his head down with his shoulder bag tucked tightly to his chest, shivering and trying very hard not to look too pathetic. The look on the older woman’s face sitting across the car told him he wasn’t being too effective. He resigned himself to his fate and pulled out his phone to browse the news while he waited for his stop.

The ride wasn’t very long, only about twenty minutes or so, which wasn’t enough time for Ryan to warm up even a little bit, the constant chill breeze from the doors opening to let people off keeping him from regaining any heat. And then he was exiting the subway car and Ryan reluctantly made the climb up the stairs to the terrible weather at street level. Just like before, he hunched his shoulders and ran the three blocks to his apartment. Even the ugly outer shell of the building, with its chipped paint and mismatched exterior doors, sent a wave of comfort over him when it came into view. It wasn’t the best apartment – not by a long shot – but it was clean and warm on the inside. Ryan couldn’t wait to stand under the hot spray of his shower for way too long, water bill be damned.

He’s shaking so hard he misses the lock on his front door a couple times before he gets the key in. The warmth greeting him when he finally gets it open is such a relief that Ryan makes a tiny noise of joy as he shuts and re-locks the door. He’s so distracted, in fact, that he doesn’t notice the dark figure standing in his living room till it’s already running straight at him. Ryan only has a couple seconds to be reminded of the crazed man on the subway platform before the figure smashes him into the wall and his head crashes back and he’s out like a light.

……..

For the umpteenth time that day, Gavin wished that he’d paid more attention in school when they gave lessons on Gaelic. It probably wouldn’t have helped much anyway but at least he’d have something to go on. At least he knew how to pronounce the words, small comfort that it was.

Translating the _Ath-_ _t_ _hogail an Saoghal_ was an excruciatingly slow process due not only to the weird mix of ancient and ‘modern’ Gaelic but how extensive the damage to its pages was. Even with the Archive’s advanced machinery and technology, including the restorative prowess of the Institute on its upper levels, each page took hours and hours of detailed work that didn’t always allow for complete translations. It was frustrating as hell.

Despite all this, Gavin had still learned an incredible amount of information regarding the Crimson Throne and their ‘dark overlord’, as Matt liked to call it. For instance, he’d been able to uncover a more detailed description of the Reconstruction; the basics of it were the release of the Prince of Slaughter so that it could ‘cleanse’ the world of impurities. What this cleansing entailed or what these impurities were exactly had yet to be uncovered. A few of the book’s illustrations depicted swaths of dark and twisting tentacles covering various cityscapes, and at least three of them were drawings of eyes crying black tears. They all gave Gavin a sick feeling in his stomach.

But the best piece of information gleaned from the book came in the form of something called ‘the Vessel’. It was referenced dozens of times in the few complete passages they’d been able to translate. This ‘Vessel’ was clearly a key part in the Reconstruction, though how exactly had yet to be defined. Its name suggested that it was meant to hold something – perhaps a power source of some kind? Gavin just couldn’t get it out of his head, no matter how head deep he was in the rest of the translations, and would often zone out and get lost in his thoughts.

He was in such a head space, down in the lab, when he was interrupted by someone talking to him from across the room.

“Hey Gavin, you’re gonna want to see this.”

Matt’s voice snapped him out of his daze. He walked over the other’s desk and leaned down to look at the computer; a network of interconnecting circles and dots criss-crossed over a map of the city, most of them concentrating on an area about a mile in circumference near the edge of the SoDo district. A vague feeling of recognition filtered through his brain but he pushed it aside.

“What’s up?”

“You know how I’ve been keeping track of Crimson Throne sightings?” Gavin nodded and Matt continued, pointing to the circles on the map. “Well, this is what I have for the past ten years, specifically for this city.”

Gavin squinted at the screen. “And I should be concerned because…? The Throne has been active since forever, makes sense for certain areas to be hot spots, especially over that long of a timeline.”

Matt huffed loudly. “Just shut up for a second and watch.” He then clicked a couple settings and suddenly the circles were no longer mostly concentrated in one area but scattered throughout the whole city. “This is ten years ago.” He clicked another few times and a smattering of new dots appeared. “This is five years ago.” More clicks. “And this – this was three years ago.”

Silence stretched between the two of them as Gavin stared at the map – the dots had almost doubled, condensing around a tighter center point. When Matt clicked through to two years, then one year ago, the circles only multiplied exponentially, all amassed in the same circular, almost mandala-like pattern. Something had changed drastically three years ago, something that made the followers of the Crimson Throne more active than they had been in decades. Whatever it was, he knew it wasn’t good – nothing that had to do with the Throne was.

“Matt, when was the last time they caused this much ruckus?”

“Over a hundred years ago, and that was way over in Eastern Europe.”

Gavin scratched at his short beard. It would be worth looking into.

Except Matt wasn’t done. “But there _was_ something similar about thirty years ago on the other side of the country.” He clicked over to a new map, this one of a much smaller city. There were circles and dots on this one too but in a much smaller concentration.

“What’s this got to do with anything?” Gavin asked with a raised eyebrow. “Looks like a hot spot but nothing we haven’t seen before with the Throne or any of the other abominations.”

There was a slight frustration to Matt’s voice now. “Yeah but _look_ -” and then he was clicking back to the original map. Then back to the smaller map. Then back again. Over and over till Gavin suddenly grabbed his shoulder in a vice-like grip.

“ _Holy_ _shit_ _.”_

The maps might have been completely different and the number of recordings weighted heavily towards their own city but the actual _pattern_ of the circles and dots was _identical_ between the two. The more Matt switched back and forth, the more clearly Gavin saw it. There was no mistaking it; the shape and spread was exactly the same.

“And that’s still not all of it,” Matt continued, a tinge of actual unease in his voice. “That last map, the one for this last year? Over a quarter of those instances happened in the last month, twenty of them in the last _week_.”

Well that wasn’t ominous at all. Something big was coming, closing in on whatever was at the center of that pattern, and Gavin knew it; he only hoped the book he found could tell him more in time to stop it.

“What’s it all mean?” He wondered aloud. His heart was beating fast.

Matt shrugged his shoulders stiffly. “I dunno but it’s not good.”

“Have you sent this to Geoff or Jack?”

“I wanted to wait to show you first.”

Gavin put a hand on Matt’s shoulder and squeezed, more for his own comfort than the other man’s. “Go ahead and send this to Jack and explain what else we’ve been finding; he might be able to help decipher what the hell all of this means. The Throne’s clearly gearing up for something and I want to stay on top of it. Maybe we should send someone out there to-”

And then it hit him why the epicenter of the markings felt familiar to him. His smile fell from his face as he grabbed Matt’s mouse and zoomed in on the map. Sure enough, his suspicions were proven true and suddenly Gavin’s stomach was filled with ice.

“Gavin, what the fuck-”

“Matt,” he interrupted, voice stern. “That’s Ryan’s neighborhood.”

“You mean, like, _that_ Ryan? The one you mentioned a while back?”

Gavin nodded and looked directly into Matt’s eyes while pointing to a building in the exact center of the circle of dots. “That’s Ryan’s apartment building.”

……..

Ryan woke slowly to the sound of his cell phone ringing from somewhere off to his right. It rang and rang till it went to voicemail, and then it rang again. Whoever was calling him did so five more times before dark figure from before came into view, growled something out under its breath, and turned the phone off. Ryan vaguely wondered who the caller was.

His head hurt; he felt like he’d been hit by a car and there was a fierce pounding right at the base of his skull, along with a dull pain at his temple. He was tied up in one of his dining table chairs, thick ropes winding around his legs and pinning his arms to his sides. Ryan recognized his living room but a shiver ran up his spine at how dark it was – the blinds on his windows had been closed and the lights were all off. He distinctly remembered installing a small nightlight in the corner just so he wouldn’t be trapped in complete darkness when he came home. He was still sleeping on his couch with all of the lights on.

The hair on the backs of his arms was raised and he was filled with such an incredible sense of dread that it practically felt tangible. Everything felt wrong; even the air felt too thick. The figure moved silently to right in front of him and just stood there staring. At least, Ryan assumed he was staring; if there was a face, he couldn’t see it among all of the shadows. He couldn’t see a mask but it looked like whoever – or whatever – the figure was, it had a large hood covering its head, hiding any identifiable features. This wasn’t just another one of the many weird cases he’d experienced over his life; this couldn’t be his imagination because it was too tangible, too _real,_ and it he was _petrified_.

“You are awake,” a voice said, though it didn’t come from the figure in front of him. “We are sorry we had to meet under such...violent circumstances.”

Another faceless shadow walked out from behind him. This one was smaller than the first but no less terrifying.

“W-what do you want from me,” Ryan stuttered out. He started to feel cold sweat drip down his back.

There was a chuckle. “We are simply here to check in on you.”

“We have been waiting a very long time to meet you.” This was yet another voice coming from behind him, though whoever it belonged to never came into sight. “It is important to us that you are healthy.”

“We saw that you visited a medical professional the other day,” came the first voice again. “We hope that nothing is amiss.”

Ryan’s stomach was twisting itself into knots. “You’re watching me?”

Someone laughed. “Of course we are.”

“We call it asset protection.”

“It is vital that you stay well until your time comes,” the second voice said in a tone that reminded Ryan of how one of his old foster mothers used to talk to him when he did something wrong. “He would not be happy if you were not.”

“Who’s ‘he’? Who are _you??_ ” Ryan’s pulse was ratcheting up for every second that passed.

The smaller figure moved closer, a completely black hand outstretched. Ryan flinched when it came into contact with his face and turned away from it. The hand dropped instead to lay delicately across his chest, right over his heart. It burned him even through his shirt and he hissed in pain.

“He is the shepherd,” the figure said. “And we are His sheep.”

A third voice, this one coming from behind Ryan and to the left, spoke up; it was raspy and sounded very old. “You were born of His flock, little one. Your parents abandoned Him for your sake but we have finally found you again.” Another hand caressed his cheek and Ryan jerked away. “It has been so long since these eyes have beheld you.”

“You knew my parents?” The twisting in Ryan’s gut increased.

But the figures ignored him. “We can see that you are not ready.”

Ryan felt more and more hands caress his body and he couldn’t get away; it felt just like his nightmare. “Ready f-for what?”

“For Him.”

A second of complete silence passed before all of the voice began to whisper at once in a language that Ryan couldn’t understand, exactly as they had done in that horrible dream. He felt panic course through his veins and all of his thoughts began to scramble.

“Shut up!” He screamed. “Nonononono not again – _fuck!_ _Stop it!!_ ”

The voices continued on as if he hadn’t said anything, all of them talking over each other and slowly drilling into his brain until it felt like they were speaking directly into Ryan’s head. There was no black slime covering his body but it still felt like his lungs were full of something other than air, despite the fact that he continued to yell. He was drowning again and he couldn’t stop it.

And then the voices abruptly stopped, almost as if on cue. When the first voice spoke again, it sounded nervous.

“We must go.” All of the hands suddenly removed themselves from Ryan’s body. “We will see you again soon. Be well.”

There was the sound of swishing fabric, his front door opening and shutting, and then Ryan was alone once more, left dizzy and panting and still tied to his chair.

……..

“Shit shit _shit_!” Gavin dialed the number again. “Pick up the damn phone!”

He’d had Lindsay track down Ryan’s phone number weeks ago but never used it till now. He needed to tell him to leave his apartment, that it was too dangerous to stay there right now. But the other man hadn’t answered the other ten times he’d called and Gavin had been sure that he’d be home at this hour; there was no reason for him to not pick up at this point. Unless, of course, whatever the Throne were planning had already happened and Gavin was too late. The anxiety building in his chest pushed him to run to his car and drive as quickly as he could to the other man’s apartment.

Something in his gut told him that he _needed_ to get to Ryan as soon as possible.

“ _Hello, you’ve reached Ryan Haywood. I’m not available to-_ ”

Gavin hung up angrily again. “Fuck!”

Why hadn’t he taken this whole thing more seriously? Why had it taken him this long to realize what an actual threat the Throne was? Realistically, there wasn’t much that Gavin could have done to prevent any of this – how could he when they had just found the book and had reason to look into any of this? - but the guilt was still there, festering in his chest like a cancer. If anything happened to Ryan-

_No_ , he told himself. _It’s no use thinking like that. He’s fine, he’ll be fine, he’s probably just in the shower or something._ He called Ryan again; still no answer.

The drive across town felt like it lasted an eternity, the car’s windshield wipers working overtime to clear the freezing rain that was making it difficult for Gavin to see the road. Only adding to the stress of the situation, downtown traffic was an absolute mess due to construction and other driver’s going slower than normal because of the slippery road conditions. What should have been a relatively short drive turned into something unacceptably lengthy and treacherous.

When Ryan’s apartment came into view, Gavin parked his car in the first open space he saw and bolted to the stairs, barely remembering to turn the car off and grab his keys. Heart pounding, he ran up the two flights to Ryan’s floor and practically slid to the door he recalled seeing Ryan standing in all those years ago. Nothing physically observable seemed off but there was a sickly sweet scent to the air and the hair on the back of Gavin’s neck stood on end; something was wrong. He tried the doorknob but of course it was locked, so he switched tactics and began pounding on the wood.

“Ryan!” He yelled. “Ryan, are you in there?”

At first, there was no response so he continued to bang his fist.

“Open the door, Ryan, it’s not safe here!” Then there was the muffled sound of someone shouting back. It was hard to hear so Gavin put his ear up to the door. “Say that again!”

“ _I’m in here!_ ” The person inside called again, this time recognizable as Ryan, the obvious sound of fear in his voice. “ _Knock the fucking door down!_ ”

Gavin didn’t waste any time; he stepped back a few feet and then launched himself at the door shoulder first. The thick wood didn’t budge. He backed up again and rolled his neck, gearing up to try again. This time, the door frame cracked just a little. It was going to take more than just his normal strength to break through to the other side. It was risky but he had to try.

Stealing himself, Gavin glanced around to see if anyone could see him; there was nobody else outside, even though he’d been making such a loud racket. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, concentrating on the little ball of energy at his core, that tiny seed of something greater than himself. He let the cool energy flow through his body for a few seconds before propelling himself forward once more. This time the frame couldn’t handle the force and the door smashed open, hitting the inside wall as Gavin exploded into the apartment.

There, in the middle of the living room, tied to a chair, was a very pale and sweaty Ryan Haywood, mouth open mid shout. It looked like he’d managed to rotate the chair a bit in his struggle to break his bonds; there were scrapes on the wood floor and one of his arms was half out of the ropes. He was clearly in the middle of a panic attack, his chest heaving and eyes crazed.

“Get me out get me out get me _out!!_ ”

Gavin ran to him and pulled out his knife, the same one he used to kill the Overtaken that had attacked Ryan in the subway. He tore through the ropes and as soon as he was free, Ryan flung himself into Gavin’s arms, shaking violently.

“Shh, it’s ok, I’ve got you.” Gavin tried to comfort him, wrapping the older man tightly into his arms.

“They were here!” Ryan roared into the front of Gavin’s shirt. “There were people – _things –_ waiting for me when I got home and they-” he heaved in a massive breath. “They knocked me out and then they were telling me these crazy things and oh god, they were in my _home_ -”

Gavin felt rage flair in his chest. “Who was here, Ryan? Can you tell me?”

“They – they said they had been watching me – I couldn’t see their faces but they _knew me_ , said they knew my real _parents_ -” A massive shudder went through Ryan. “They said that I wasn’t ready and that they’d be back.”

So the Throne had made their move. Gavin pulled away just enough so he could see Ryan’s face; there were no tears, just the face of a man who was terrified. “Then we better get you out of here, hmm?”

Ryan nodded stiffly and Gavin helped him to stand up, keeping an arm around the older man’s middle to keeping him from wobbling too much. Together, they exited the apartment and slowly walked down the stairs to the parking lot. The further they got from the building, the more the weird feeling seemed to dissipate. Gavin let Ryan into the passenger side before walking around the car and getting into the driver’s seat. He started the car and turned the heat on full blast. Looking at the clock, he saw that only ten minutes had passed since he arrived. Now that the adrenaline had worn off, Gavin felt an overly-familiar exhaustion spread through his body; using that extra little spark always did this to him.

In the safety of the black sedan, Ryan held his head in his hands and stared into his lap with wide eyes, still shivering slightly. When he finally spoke, his voice was hoarse and he sounded utterly exhausted. “You saved me again. I don’t know how to thank you.”

“It’s not really in the job description but it kind of comes with the territory-”

“No, really,” the older man interrupted, eyes meeting Gavin’s, so deep and blue and expressive. “I was so scared and you _saved me_. This isn’t some small thing, Agent Free.”

Gavin stared back at him, teeth fidgeting with his bottom lip. The look on Ryan’s face intrigued him; it was open, serious, and still a little afraid. There was something haunted in that gaze that Gavin couldn’t put a name to, an emotion whose definition was just out of reach. He made a decision right then and there that he would protect this man, this traumatized man who had obviously seen too much in his life and deserved to feel safe for once. And if he was going to do that, Gavin had to get him to trust him. What better way to start than a proper introduction?

“Gavin,” he said gently.

Ryan raised his head, still looking into his eyes with that intense stare. “What?”

“My name is Gavin, and I am going to keep you safe.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I live on [Tumblr](http://toasterness.tumblr.com) so come and say hi!


	6. Heart To Heart

“You think I’m _haunted_?”

Gavin rubbed the back of his neck. “I mean, yes? No. Kind of.” He pulled lightly at his hair. “That’s a really basic way of saying it but yeah, something like that.”

They were sitting at the bar in Gavin’s kitchen, an hour after Ryan’s rescue, steaming cups of tea in both their hands. While Geoff had insisted that Ryan should be transferred to the Archives for ‘safety’, Gavin thought it would be better for him to stay at his place for the time being. The Archives were, all things considered, a pretty secure place, but Ryan’s comfort was important right now too and having an actual home to be in every day would be better for his psyche. Gavin had assured him that the Institute would call his work in the morning to have his absence excused – they had their ways, he said. It just wasn’t safe for Ryan to be out and about right then.

Gavin had vowed to be mostly honest with him though, which meant explaining the running theory on why the Throne had such interest in him.

Hands held tightly around his mug, Ryan stared him down with piercing blue eyes. “Ok, so what’s wrong with me then?”

“Nothing’s wrong with you!” Gavin almost shouted, surprising the both of them. He went on in a softer tone. “Nothing is wrong with you, Ryan; you’re just being followed? I guess is the way to put it?”

“Followed by _what_?”

A huge sigh left Gavin. “The Crimson Throne. They’re a fanatical cult that follows Ichthis, the Prince of Slaughter. We don’t know a lot about them but we’re working on it.”

“That, uh, that doesn’t sound very comforting.”

“No, I’d have to agree with you on that one.” He paused for just a moment to collect his thoughts. “Matt – one of my coworkers – and I have this theory that you somehow got too close or something to one of their rituals and therefore some bits of residual energy got attached to you. Your flat is at the center of a lot of activity – as I’ve witnessed a couple times myself – so it might even just be the building and not you.”

Ryan had turned to frown at his mug halfway through this explanation, brows furrowed. He seemed to be thinking hard about something so Gavin left him alone, figuring he’d talk about it if it was important. Eventually he did speak, though his eyes remained focused on his drink.

“I’d like to think that’s the case but weird stuff’s been happening to me all my life. And those... _people_ said they knew me, and my biological parents. _I_ don’t even know who my parents are.”

Gavin thought back to the map that Matt had shown him and the different spots of activity around the country. And if Ryan had been experiencing these kinds of things for that long, then maybe it wasn’t the building after all; perhaps he was connected to the rest of ittoo.

“Were you, by chance, born on the east coast?”

Ryan’s head whipped up to face him, eyebrows pinched together. “How did you know that?”

“Ah, well.” Gavin cleared his throat. “A similar string of events happened a little over thirty years ago in a small town in Massachusetts, and I thought, maybe...”

“Maybe _what?_ ” Now Ryan sounded worried again.

After a slow breath in, Gavin began to explain his hypothesis. “Going off of these cultists and how they claim to know you – and your real parents – and the fact that you might have been in the same area as the first collection of episodes, there’s the slight chance they want you for whatever plans they have to start their big ritual.”

“What, like a sacrifice? They said I wasn’t ready.”

Ryan had told him, once he’d fully calmed down and had a long shower, all of what the Throne cultists had said and done to him, even explaining the nightmare he’d had a month ago and how everything had felt so similar. This particular part about ‘readiness’ intrigued Gavin the most; what were they getting Ryan ready for? A sacrifice made the most sense, especially since cultures around the world had been using purification ceremonies before sacrificial rights for centuries – it seemed appropriate to guess that this case could be the same.

“It definitely appears as such, though we can’t be sure. I’ve got Matt doing some more surveillance, and I’ve been translating a book about the subject for a while now, so we’ll hopefully have more concrete answers soon. There’s mention about some sort of object – a vessel – that the Throne needs, so we’re attempting to track that down too. Until we figure out what’s going on though I think it’s best we keep you here for safety so the Throne can’t try any more creepy shit.”

Ryan gave a small, tired laugh. “Sounds alright to me; I don’t really want to go back to my place right now anyway.” Another pause. “How exactly is it safer here? I thought you said that your boss wanted me to stay at the, uh, the Archives?”

Gavin felt a swell of guilt building inside; he couldn’t tell the other man the truth without scaring him off, how it was literally Gavin’s very presence that protected him. “I’ve brought some, er, wards from the Archives – the Throne won’t be able to find you here.”

He could tell Ryan didn’t quite believe; he sighed in relief when the older man dropped the subject. “Don’t suppose you grabbed any of my stuff before we ran outta there? I could do with a change of clothes that aren’t just borrowed sweatpants.”

……..

“So, what exactly are these ‘abominations’?” Ryan crooked his fingers in quotation.

Gavin smiled and leaned back in his chair. “It’s a little complicated to explain really.”

“Try me.”

“I knew I liked you for a reason,” Gavin quipped as his smile widened. “Right, so – you know that general feeling of foreboding you get when walking by dark alleys? Or the squirming in your gut when you touch raw meat?” Ryan quirked an eyebrow and nodded. “Well, the abominations – entities, if you will – are kind of responsible for that.”

“What – how does that work?”

Gavin looked a little sheepish. “Ah. We don’t really know the actual mechanics behind it, we just sort of, er, _know_ – you know?”

“That makes absolutely no sense.” Ryan laughed quietly.

“Yes, well-” Gavin huffed. “It’s like this: everything non-physical in the world, all the emotions and fears and instinctual feelings we have, can be broken down into base forms, their primal states.” At Ryan’s further look of confusion, he continued. “Our Lady of the Web, for instance, draws her power from the entanglement of souls – she exists in secrets, in lies, in the fear of betrayal. Veros is the literal embodiment of death, which is pretty self-explanatory, I think, and the Iron Crown craves blood and flesh – its followers tend to, uh, participate in the most disgusting of taboos.”

“Eating people?”

Gavin snorted. “You’re getting it now.”

“What about this Prince of Slaughter guy? I know you said you didn’t know much about him but, I mean, I know literally nothing and apparently I’m involved now, so.”

“The Prince of Slaughter is...” Gavin stopped for a few seconds, debating the best way to explain. “Well, it’s a challenging one to really make sense of; as far as we know, it focuses on the obsessive fear of ceasing to exists, or of being forgotten. Or, for its followers at least, a frankly very confusing desire to be completely assimilated into some sort of all-encompassing void.”

“So, like, the mortifying ordeal of being _un-_ known?”

That was certainly a new way to think about it but Gavin rather liked it. “Sure, that’s as good an explanation as any.”

Ryan chuckled and ran a hand through his hair. _He needs a haircut_ , Gavin observed idly to himself, distracted by the way some of the light brown strands stuck up in odd directions. “Alright, so how many of them are there, exactly?”

Startling slightly out of his wandering thoughts, Gavin went on. “We know of at least ten, some more powerful that others. Mind you, there’s most likely more that we haven’t found or defined yet – the world is full of terrifying and incomprehensible things. The Archive’s been around, in some form or another, for centuries but even we can’t know everything.”

“There’s still time, I guess.”

The silence that followed was comfortable; they’d been doing this a lot lately, sitting in the living room or at the dining table and talking. Subjects changed but they usually revolved around the things they had in common. Gavin shared things about his job – not too much though; you know, ‘case confidentiality’ and all that – and Ryan told him about his past experiences with all things weird. He found it pleasant, actually, to have someone to talk to outside of the Archives, especially when they just rambled about whatever came to their mind.

For instance, Gavin quickly learned that Ryan was a huge nerd. He’d get going on a topic and keep info-dumping and Gavin would just sit and listen, content to let him rant about his favorite things; it was mildly surprising and ultimately very endearing. The other man would also go right along with Gavin’s random hypotheticals and ideas, totally willing to get lost in that world with him – his other friends rarely did that. It was easy to get along with Ryan, a natural progression that was happening without conscious effort; it was nice.

“Right!” Gavin clapped his hands together. “Pizza or Indian tonight?”

Ryan grinned at him from across the table. “Indian, but one of these days I’m going to teach you how to cook for yourself; you can’t keep living off of take-out.”

“Nonsense, I’ve done so for this long and I reckon I’ll continue to survive!”

“Except you’ve got me now, so you don’t have any excuses not to learn.”

Gavin rolled his eyes fondly. “Fine, fine, you can give me a lesson, though I doubt I’ll be a very good student.” He stood from his seat and pointed a finger at Ryan. “Don’t get upset when I inevitably burn the flat down!”

The other man laughed deep in his chest and smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “Challenge accepted.”

And _oh_ but that smile put a silly kind of warmth in his chest.

……..

Three weeks in and the two of them had settled in to a new routine. Ryan’s boss had given him permission to work from home, so he spent his days focusing on that instead of dwelling on whatever it was that wanted him for its nefarious plans. It got tiring to think about his own possible doom all the time and the general monotony of work helped distract him. And then, by the time he started to get antsy, Gavin was usually back home. On the (unfortunately frequent) days that the Brit worked late, Ryan would busy himself with odd tasks like cleaning or putting the TV on and mindlessly watching whatever came up first.

Tonight was one of the nights that Gavin hadn’t come home at his normal time; it was already past 10:00 and Ryan had only just received a text saying he was on his way. Which was a good thing considering that Ryan’s hands had developed a slight tremor and he was beginning to feel anxious. He couldn’t sleep unless someone was in the apartment with him, so going to bed wasn’t really an option even though he was actually quite tired.

A short ten minutes later and he heard the front door unlock with Gavin’s light footsteps soon following, deadbolt sliding into place right after. Ryan let out a huge huff of air and felt his nerves immediately calm down. He got up off the couch and made his way into the kitchen to greet Gavin but cut himself off when he actually got a look at the other man:

He look haggard, clothes all sorts of disheveled and filthy, with dark shadows under his eyes that hadn’t been there that morning hollowing out his face. He moved sluggishly into the room.

Ryan’s stomach turned. “Gavin?”

“Hmm?” The younger man responded, meeting his gaze with an exhausted expression as he flung his sopping jacket over the back of one of the dining chairs.

“Are you – are you ok?”

Gavin seemed to mull this over before smiling; it didn’t reach his eyes. “Oh, I’ve been a bit better but I’ll be alright? Just, ah, overworked myself a bit is all.”

Now that simply wouldn’t do. “Come on, Gavin, I have eyes – you look like shit.”

“Well now, that’s a bit rude.” Ryan fixed him with a stern look and his face dropped. “Alright, alright, fine.” He scrubbed his face with his hands. “Went on a surprise hunt earlier this evening with Michael; we finally got a positive lead on that mirror I was telling you about? Turns out it had a bad case of the drownies.”

Ryan laughed a tiny bit, walking over to get a better look at the younger man, scanning him up and down for damage. “The what?”

“Drownies! You know, when something starts inexplicably spilling water out of itself in an attempt to drown everything around in it in disgusting muddy water?” He let Ryan lift his arms and move his face around with his hands. “Managed to only swallow a bit of it though, which is good. You should see Michael – poor sod got the worst of it.”

Satisfied that Gavin wasn’t hurt, Ryan stepped back again. “I assume you took care of it though?”

“Smashed it myself.”

“Of course you did,” Ryan affirmed. “Now go take a shower – you stink.”

Gavin flipped him off as he wandered down the hall to the bathroom. As soon as the door was shut, Ryan let his shoulders drop; Gavin was fine, everything was going to be ok, all of this just came with the job and Gavin was good at it. No need to coddle him too much.

But Gavin had looked so damn worn down and Ryan felt the urgent need to fix that. It took him a few minutes of thinking but he was eventually inspired by a gentle memory of a foster dad from when he was very little who would make pancakes every time he got hurt; it never failed to make him feel better and was one of only a scant few positive memories that Ryan had from his childhood. So that was it – he’d make pancakes.

Ever since they’d had their conversation about Ryan teaching Gavin how to cook, the cupboards had been filled with ingredients, so pulling out the right stuff was easy. Ryan looked up a recipe on his phone and got to work. It didn’t take much time before the kitchen to started smelling like sweet bread and before long, there was a small stack of pancakes on a plate on the counter. He pulled some syrup and peanut butter out of the pantry from the one time Gavin had attempted to make French toast and placed them next to the food.

“What’s all this about then?”

Ryan looked up and there was Gavin, newly clean and a little pink in the cheeks from the hot shower, hair still wet and darkening his t-shirt where the water dripped; he looked infinitely better, though still tired. “Figured you needed a little pick me up.”

“Oh.” Was it just Ryan’s imagination or did the color on Gavin’s face darken just the slightest? “That’s, er, really kind of you.”

“It’s the least I could do.” He sat down at the bar and patted the stool next to him. “Now come on, eat before you fall asleep on your feet.”

Gavin grinned and joined him, sliding two pancakes onto his plate and absolutely smothering them in syrup. Ryan just watched him for a few moments, a small smile of his own on his face.

Mouth still full of food, Gavin looked up at him, fork halfway to his mouth. “Wha’?”

“Nothing,” Ryan chuckled and started preparing his own meal.

It was all going to be ok.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wish I could live in this lovely soft place but we're gonna be getting down to the icky stuff real soon.
> 
> Come yell at me on [Tumblr](http://toasterness.tumblr.com).


	7. Living Nightmare

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a Body Horror warning again - steer clear of the italics if that kind of weird shit freaks you out!

_He was walking on the beach again._

_It felt different_ _t_ _his time, like the air was thick_ _er_ _and he was going slow because of it. But the ocean was still there on his right, crashing to the shore in its steady rhythm, and the wind_ _still_ _rustled through his thin clothing_ _and chilled him just a little_ _. He felt that same pull towards something just out of sight and continued to walk in that direction even though he couldn’t see his own hands in front of him. The darkness was comfortable though, soft and peaceful. Nothing_ _w_ _ould harm him here._

_When the voices started, he remained calm and let them wash over his mind, their words still incoherent but their meaning not lost on him._ _He knew they were words of promise, of solace and peace; he was not afraid, they would not_ _lead_ _him_ _astray_ _._

_At the first touch of the unseen hands on his skin, he felt himself smile and welcom_ _ed_ _the familiar feeling. These too would do him no harm and he continued to walk with a sturdy purpose towards whatever it was that was calling to him. For every step he took, more voices joined the chorus in his head and more hands caressed his body. They were everywhere now and he felt so tranquil; this was the natural state of things._

_He wasn’t sure how long he walked this time but eventually he came to the end. There was no reason for it to be the end except for_ _it felt_ _like the right_ _place_ _to stop walking,_ _so he did. Neither the voices nor the shadows seemed to disagree – they seemed quite pleased with it really, almost humming against him. It felt good. Really, really good._

_A hand began to travel up his neck, its pressure light and delicate, till it reached his face. With the smallest amount of coaxing, it slid against his mouth till he opened it, welcoming what was now a singular, long appendage_ _instead of fingers_ _. It filled his mouth and then his throat, pulsing as it_ _descended_ _; he loved it, craved it even, like it was satisfying a_ _hunger_ _he hadn’t known_ _existed_ _. There was no flavor and yet it was the sweetest thing he had ever tasted. He swallowed around it to draw it deeper inside._

_Two more tentacles reached his nose and he inhaled, drawing them in and up his nostrils till they spilled down the back of his throat to join the_ _first_ _one. It didn’t sting at all and he loved the feeling of the invasion; he needed this._

_The rest of the hands began to tighten their hold on him but not in a painful way,_ _slowly seeping into his pores and filling up every fiber and cell,_ _stuffing him so deeply and completely that he couldn’t tell where he ended and the darkness began_ _. His organs were being eaten_ _whole_ _but just as quickly replaced with something else, pieces of the writhing mass that had encased him in its gentleness. Only his lungs were left as is,_ _achingly_ _full with the living darkness as they were. He couldn’t breath_ _e_ _but what was the point anyway when the voices assured him that he didn’t need to? The shadows would take care of him._

_M_ _ore_ _was happening_ _than just the consumption though – he could feel himself chang_ _ing_ _, warping into something not quite human. His mouth felt too full of his own teeth as the thing sliding in and out of it scraped against them, and it felt like he could see in all directions despite the pitch darkness, like he had eyes not just on the front of his face._ _His bones creaked and broke, his limbs shifted and grew._ _Whatever it was that was in him was also recreating him._ _He was being remade._

_It felt amazing._ _It was ecstasy._

_Here, there was no pain, only endless belonging and perverse pleasures._ _Here, he was a part of something more than himself, something beyond comprehension._ _Why he had denied himself this for so long, he didn’t know; he was clearly meant for this, the metamorphosis exactly what he needed. It was disgusting and depraved and so, so right._

_Except._

_There was another voice, almost unnoticeable at first, the others louder and more insistent in their delivery. This one didn’t speak in the same language as the rest but he still couldn’t quite make out what it was saying. What it did do was pause his complete worship of the shadows and what they were doing to him, just for a second. But that was a second too long._

_Instantly the contents of his lungs felt as foreign as they_ _truly_ _were and he choked, as futile as it was to resist at that point._ _It was like_ _the darkness_ _knew that his trust had faltered, even the tiniest bit._ _He tried to use his transformed teeth to bite the thing in his mouth but he wasn’t even close to being strong enough to damage it. With renewed vigor, it started slamming itself_ _in_ _and_ _out of_ _his throat, lodging pieces in the cracks it left behind. The pain was_ _indescribable_ _and he couldn’t think of anything except for its torturous pace. That is, until the hands still outside his body began to pull._

_To say it was excruciating would be an understatement; he was being pulled apart, piece by piece, atom by atom. How could anything be this painful? Why had he not died already? He tried to scream but of course he couldn’t – the shadows were still inside him, still holding together all the parts they had made especially for him. Where before everything had felt so right, now everything felt more wrong than anything ever should._

_Water lapped at his feet and he was suddenly reminded that he was on a beach, the ocean_ _literally touching him._ _The lone voice that had awakened him to his corruption seemed to be calling out for water._ _Perhaps he could get the cold tide to pull away the darkness? The waves could baptize him and exorcise that which was suffocating him. He had no other hopes, no other options, so he begged his limbs to cooperate just this one last time._

_Letting the spray of the ocean guide him, he took step after jerky step as he willed his body to wade into the surf. It was a monumental task that he had no confidence in but that he needed to work. The shadows pulled and pulled, hindering his progress, and every step was agonizing,_ _b_ _ut eventually the water reached his chest and he let himself collapse, the ocean swallowing him up whole._

_Yet the shadows persisted in their attempts at tearing him to pieces. He couldn’t fight back, could only let the waves pull him further out and further down._ _If this didn’t work, then this was the end of him as he knew himself._

_The water pulled him deeper and deeper, the blackness around him growing somehow_ _even_ _darker, the pressure increasing and squeezing his already invaded lungs. Everything hurt and he could do nothing to stop it. He tried to_ _move_ _but the invisible hands held him too tightly and the shadows twisted around him;_ _t_ _he mere memory of air eluded him as the crushing depths welcomed him into their folds._ _His mind_ _pleaded_ _for unconsciousness._ _Just let me die, he_ _finally_ _begged the nothing, and the nothing ignored him_

_Every time he thought it was over, that he had finally_ _succumbed_ _to the darkness,_ _the thing in his throat would thrust particularly aggressively_ _into his chest and stomach_ _and the pain would rouse him enough to remind him of where he was. He had thought that the water could save him but_ _he was wrong –_ _it wasn’t enough to stop the torrent of sludge invading his body; it was already a part of him. He could_ _still_ _feel it slithering under his skin, breaking his bones and enveloping his organs. No matter how much he wanted to scream though, his body could not – he was stuck in his own head as the entity around and in him pulled him deeper._

Ryan.

_That voice. That singular voice, breaking through the incessant whispered shouts in his head._

Ryan!

_Someone was yelling his name. He heard it like it was coming from above him but still only saw blackness. The phantom hands gripped even tighter at the sound. His cheek stung slightly, like something had hit him._

Wake up, Ryan!

_He was...asleep? But everything felt so real. Was this another nightmare? And that voice – he knew that voice – that was Gavin. He had to get to him, he had to get out. If this was a dream, then there was a chance he could escape after all; he searched and searched till he found just the smallest amount of energy left in his body and kicked his legs feebly towards what he thought was the surface. He was so close, he could feel it. The shadows ripped at his skin but he kept on struggling till his hand breached the water and his head soon followed, Gavin still shouting his name._

…… _.._

Gavin jerked awake.

He lay stock still in his bead, ears straining for any sign of whatever it was that woke him up. The bedroom was quiet, there was barely any noise from the streets outside, and his headphones had fallen out hours ago, the podcast episode he’d been listening to long ended. Slowly, he sat up and looked around; nothing was different or out of place in his room. He closed his eyes and concentrated – there: a small noise coming from the other side of the door. He waited for it to happen again to make sure it wasn’t a fluke and thirty seconds later the sound happened again, this time the tiniest bit louder. It sounded like a choking gasp.

_Ryan_.

The bedroom door was ripped open as Gavin ran into the living room; his stomach plummeted at the sight that greeted him:

Ryan was still laying on the couch where he normally slept but instead of the peaceful vision of sleep that he should have been, he was thrashing like he was in the throws of a seizure. At first, Gavin thought this might be the case but when he reached Ryan, it was clear that something more sinister was going on; something slimy and black was dripping out of his nostrils and tear ducts, already smeared across his pillow. He let out another gasp that was more gurgle than anything and more of the black stuff splattered out from his mouth. His whole body convulsed as it tried to expel whatever it was that was in his lungs.

“Holy shit.” Gavin leaned over to try and shake Ryan awake by the shoulders. “Ryan! Ryan, wake up!” But nothing changed.

Heart in his throat, Gavin raced back to his room to grab his phone and called Michael as soon as he picked it up, running back to Ryan while the call rang. He put the phone on speaker and placed it on the coffee table so he could maneuver the larger man onto his side. The black ichor trickled in thick lines out of already stained lips as Ryan continued to suffocate, a familiar sickly sweet smell permeating the air.

On the table, the call connected and Michael’s voice came through. “ _Wh_ _y_ _the fuck are you calling me at two am, Gavin_.”

“Oh thank god, Michael, something’s really wrong.” Gavin tried not to sound too freaked out but he doubted he was successful. “I think Ryan’s having a nightmare but there’s shit in his _lungs_ , Michael.”

“ _What? What do you mean?_ ” Michael sounded wide awake now. A woman’s voice in the background suggested that Lindsay was awake too.

“I mean that there’s black liquid literally coming out of his nose and eyes and he keeps choking on it!”

“ _Fuck, hold on_.” There was rustling on Michael’s end. “ _Do_ _you think this has anything to do with the Throne?_ ”

Gavin lifted Ryan so he could sit on the couch and hold him upright, hoping the position would help the older man clear his lungs. “I’d bet fucking money on it. I think it’s the thing that’s following him. What the hell do I _do?!_ He won’t wake up!”

“ _It sounds like he’s stuck in a night terror_ _,_ ” came Lindsay’s voice now. “ _And he probably doesn’t know he i_ _s; n_ _ight terrors feel_ _way too_ _real._ ”

“So how do I get him _un_ -stuck??” Gavin tried thumping Ryan’s back, which caused him to cough a little bit more but all that really happened was the carpet getting sprayed with the dark liquid.

“ _I don’t know!_ _Uhh_ _-_ ” The muffled sound of a door slamming came through the phone. “ _Maybe..._ _you’ve seen ‘Inception’, right?_ ”

“Yes but what’s that got to do with it?”

“ _How’d they force the people to wake up,_ _Gav_ _?”_

“A kick. A kick!” Gavin couldn’t help the incredulity in his tone.

Lindsay’s voice came back just as unsure. “ _Yes!_ _Try something they did in the movie_ _!_ ”

Thinking fast, Gavin picked up his phone, gathered his strength, hooked his arms underneath Ryan’s, and started pulling him towards the bathroom; the bigger man was heavy and his constant jerky movement made moving him extremely challenging. Gavin allowed himself to take a little bit of energy from the hidden ball of light deep in his core and used it to hurry the process but he was already so exhausted from the hunt earlier that day. There was absolutely no guarantee that this would work – it was entirely based off of a fictional movie, for fuck’s sake! – but it was all he had.

He turned on the bathroom light before unceremoniously dumping both himself and Ryan into the large shower and turning it on full blast, letting the cold water soak them both. Gavin slid his phone out of the spray as an afterthought, mind almost solely focused on the man in his arms as he continued to shake. He held on tight, trying to prevent Ryan from hurting himself.

“Come on, Ryan, come on-”

Michael was back on the phone. “ _Is it working??_ ”

“No,” Gavin responded with growing panic. “He’s still not waking up!”

“ _Ok, hold on Gav, we’re on our way. Keep trying!_ ”

And try Gavin did, shouting at Ryan and slapping his face. The black ooze was washing off his face and onto his bare chest, pooling in his navel and onto the shower floor. He continued to choke on it, mouth open and drooling it down his jaw and neck. Some streaks didn’t rinse away and Gavin realized they were veins, black and pulsing along Ryan’s chest, neck, and face;he felt sick to his stomach at the sight and smell of it all.

Then, suddenly and violently, Ryan jerked from his hold to sit straight up. A split second later and he was vomiting an incredible amount of thick black bile, coughing and retching in between heaves, that disgusting sludge covering both of their legs and the white shower tiles. There wasn’t nearly enough water to rinse it all away.

Gavin reached his arm out to give comfort but Ryan jerked away at the contact, slipping on the floor as he turned around and backed into the corner, the two feet between them feeling like miles. Dripping black hand prints were left on the glass partition from his attempts to hold himself up. His eyes were wide and unseeing, his breaths uneven, and he continued to cough aggressively. He looked like a cornered animal.

“Ryan, it’s me,” Gavin said as calmly as he could, not moving any closer. “It’s Gavin.”

A moment passed where there was no recognition in Ryan’s face. Then, with a ragged voice, he spoke.

“Are you real?”

Gavin still didn’t move. “Yeah, I’m real, this is all real. You’re safe now.”

“I-” Another wave of bile spewed from Ryan’s lips, flecks of it hitting Gavin’s face. When he was finished, he curled his knees into his chest and wrapped his arms around them. “It hurts.”

The fear in the older man’s voice prompted Gavin to finally scoot himself closer so he could hold Ryan’s face in his hands, raising it so they could look into each other’s eyes. He wiped his thumb over the corner of Ryan’s mouth.

“I know, I’m so sorry, but you’re ok now, I’m here.”

“The shadows were back and-” Ryan coughed. “I _heard_ you but they had me and I was _drowning_ -”

Gavin gently pulled him back into his arms, Ryan’s face pressed into the crook of his neck. “And you’re not anymore, yeah? I’ve got you.”

Coughing soon turned to sobs as Ryan fell apart. Water continued to wash over their bodies, carrying the darkness with it down the drain. Gavin could do nothing but hold him and whisper reassurances to him as he released his fear.

They sat there for ten minutes under the frigid water before Ryan spoke. “I let it in again.”

“What do you mean?” Gavin murmured.

“The voices asked me to let the darkness in and I did. I _wanted_ it.” Ryan took a shuddering breath. “Only at first but then it was inside and I couldn’t – I couldn’t get it out. It was _changing_ me and I-I almost _let_ it-”

The sight of the black veins underneath Ryan’s skin flashed across Gavin’s mind; he glanced at the larger man’s cheek and was relieved to see that none remained. “But it didn’t work, Ryan, you’re right here and you’re ok, you’re still you.”

Ryan pulled a few inches away to look at Gavin with plaintive eyes. “What if it happens again though and I can’t stop it? What if you’re not here to, to wake me up again?”

In that moment, Ryan sounded so small and fatigued that it carved a hole right in Gavin’s heart. “Then I’ll do my best to always be close.”

“I just – am I even still human?”

“Course you are!” Gavin shook him weakly. “Course you are.”

“But what if that changes? It got so far this time and I don’t-”

“I won’t let that happen.”

Ryan squeezed his eyes tightly shut. “I don’t want to be a monster.”

And that was it, wasn’t it? The real root of everything. Because Gavin had no idea what was happening to Ryan, not really, so what could he do? He wanted so badly to tell the other man about the thing that lived inside _him_ but what would that do except scare him? Gavin needed to be a source of trust and admitting that he was harboring a piece of another entity inside himself would hardly lead to that. No, this wasn’t the time to reveal this particular secret. Maybe someday, when Ryan was ready, but not now.

At that moment, the sound of the front door being unlocked and opened reached them. Ryan stiffened in his hold but Gavin gave him a comforting squeeze.

“It’s just Michael.”

Sure enough, the lad soon called out. “Gav? We used the spare key! Where are you? Did it work?”

“In the bathroom!”

There were hurried footsteps and then Michael and Lindsay – still in their sleeping clothes – were standing in the bathroom, twin expressions of worry on their faces. Michael reached in and turned the shower off while Lindsay pulled out several towels from under the sink.

“Hi Ryan,” she said softly as she approached, a kind smile gracing her features. “I’m Lindsay, a friend of Gavin’s. When you’re ready, I’d like to wrap you up in this towel, ok?”

Ryan jerked his head in a semblance of a nod.

“It was Lindsay’s idea that helped me wake you up,” Gavin explained.

“Thank you,” the older man said to her. Lindsay just continued to smile comfortingly at him.

Michael stood behind his wife, concern written all over his face. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, I think so.” Gavin looked to Ryan for confirmation; he nodded again and released his grip on the front of Gavin’s wet shirt, slowly rising from his knees.

Still only in his pajama bottoms, Ryan stepped out of the shower and Lindsay wrapped a large towel around his shoulders; he remained hunched in on himself as he pulled it tighter. Gavin soon followed, removing his shirt as he did and grabbing his own towel from Michael. His friends led the way out into the living room. Before they entered though, Gavin tugged on Ryan’s towel to stop him.

He moved closer to whisper to him, a moment just for them. “I won’t lie and say I know what’s going on but I _will_ figure it out. You are not – nor will you ever be – a monster, Ryan Haywood; this I promise to you.”

The smallest of smiles appeared on Ryan’s face.

“Ok.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I said it was gonna get icky, didn't I?
> 
> I'm always available for shouting matches on [Tumblr](http://toasterness.tumblr.com)


	8. Alone Together

_Nuair a bhios an long deiseil,_

_fosglaidh an geata agus tòisichidh an ath-thogail;_

_nì an sgriosadair an soitheach na dhachaigh;_

_glanaidh prionnsa na marbhadh saoghal a ’pheacaidh,_

_stainidh e le sgàil, agus ith an fìor anam dheth._

Things were much the same after the nightmare, except for one notable change: Ryan now shared Gavin’s king sized bed at night.

It had been Gavin’s idea – he’d come out to get some water the night after and Ryan was staring blankly at the TV, some random show on that he wasn’t paying any attention to. All of the lights were on and he’d been startled when Gavin stepped into view, bloodshot eyes staring at the Brit’s concerned face – he hadn’t really even been blinking much, let alone sleeping. _Right, come on then_ , Gavin had said, jerking his head back towards his bedroom. Ryan hadn’t responded, just followed him and collapsed onto the bed once Gavin lifted the sheets. When Gavin came back from getting his drink, he left the hall light on and the door cracked open.

During the day, they went about their business. Gavin drove to the Archives early every morning and Ryan continued to use his laptop to work from the apartment. It was a good arrangement, one that worked well for both of them and allowed for safety and productivity in equal measures. Gavin was able to spend his time working on other cases and deciphering the _Ath-_ _t_ _hogail an Saoghal_ in the comfort of his own office and labs, and Ryan’s employer was still allowing him to do his business remotely. All in all, pretty normal considering the circumstances.

But at night, they slept under the same comforter.

When they finally got into bed at the end of the day – sometimes in the middle of the night – Ryan would slip under the covers first and Gavin would follow. The bed was large enough that there was plenty of space between them but Ryan always found himself shifting towards the younger man during the night and Gavin let him. They never touched, not really, but the comfort of knowing he was there seemed to be enough to lull Ryan to sleep every night.

He still had nightmares, of course, but nothing quite as extreme as what the two of them referred to as the ‘Big One’, and Gavin was always able to wake the other man up, whether it be with a hard shake to his shoulder or calling his name loudly. Ryan felt secure in knowing that their close proximity at night would ensure his dreams didn’t go too far again.

At some point though things changed. It was easy, really, for the two of them to gravitate closer and closer over time, like pieces falling into place. First came the disregard of previous attempts at separation while sleeping – it was so much more comfortable to fall asleep when Gavin held Ryan’s hand to his chest, the Brit’s steady heartbeat a gentle comfort. Then came the soft words spoken in the morning to assure Ryan that he was awake, always accompanied by gentle touches that never invaded too much of his space. Gavin was so good about that; he never touched Ryan without permission, always respectful of his aversion to it despite the trust between them, the memory of unseen hands all over his body still fresh in his mind. He couldn’t be more thankful for that thoughtfulness.

When Gavin was at work, Ryan sometimes found himself experiencing mini anxiety attacks, small things that he normally wouldn’t worry about but the younger man had insisted he call if ever he felt overwhelmed. And every time he did, Gavin picked up within a couple rings and would talk him down, voice soothing and grounding. Ryan had never had this kind of bond with another person before and it often left him feeling dazed – in an entirely new and wonderful way.

There were times where they would be drinking their morning coffee together, or cooking dinner in the kitchen, or just sitting in the living room while they worked on various things, and Ryan would suddenly be aware of how _domestic_ it all was. And for reasons he couldn’t quite place, it wasn’t the least bit awkward. He was comfortable in that apartment with Gavin; he felt safe.

This went on for two months, and those weeks went by quickly. Ryan sometimes even forgot the reason he was staying with Gavin in the first place. He never became ungrateful though – there was always an overarching sense of stability and comfort in everything that happened between them.

Tonight Ryan was woken from a nightmare again, the memory of Gavin’s calming voice still in his ear. This wasn’t new – it happened frequently, in fact – but this time it was gradual instead of all the other times where it was a shock, his heart still pounding and lungs heaving. He was calm now though, with almost no adrenaline pumping through his body. He continued to lay there silently, trying to pinpoint what had woken him up if it wasn’t Gavin forcing him out of the dream. And when he finally did, his heartbeat quickly began to speed up:

Gavin had him cradled in his arms, Ryan’s head tucked neatly under his chin with their legs tangled together. They never got this close, not even after nightmares – it just wasn’t something they did, no matter how comfortable they were around each other. It wasn’t like Ryan didn’t like this new situation though; on the contrary, he found it _amazing_. It was like being surrounded by the literal embodiment of goodness, however silly that sounded. He wanted to stay there forever.

As if he could sense Ryan’s wakeful state, Gavin shifted a little in his sleep, rousing just enough to tighten his hold and mumble something softly into the top of Ryan’s head. Goosebumps rose on Ryan’s skin at the feeling of a hand resting on his hip, thumb stroking back and forth lightly in some sort of unconscious act of solace. It made Ryan’s heart swell with something he couldn’t put a name to.

Carefully, so as not to disturb him anymore, Ryan shifted closer into Gavin, pressing their bodies together neatly. Gavin sighed contentedly and tightened his embrace briefly in a tiny hug. Ryan never fell back asleep after nightmares – he just couldn’t, not after seeing the things his brain supplied for him in the depths of the night. He would usually go into the living room and mindlessly watch TV till morning. Gavin insisted on joining him the first couple times but Ryan eventually convinced him that he didn’t need to. But tonight felt different; tonight Ryan felt like he could stay in this bed, stay in Gavin’s arms, stay in this safe space, without there being negative consequences.

And he was right: just a few minutes after he resettled against Gavin, Ryan was asleep once more. He didn’t dream at all.

……..

Gavin woke up very warm.

The sun hadn’t even started to rise yet but he was still so much warmer than he usually was. It took him a few seconds to register the man next to him, curled against his body like his own personal heater. His heart leapt to his throat as he remembered last night – Ryan shaking violently in his sleep, Gavin pulling him into his arms and whispering soft things into his ear, the other man calming down and snuggling closer. And here he still was, cradled in his embrace, sleeping soundly. Gavin didn’t have any motivation to move.

Glancing at his alarm clock, he realized he had only a few minutes until it went off, dawn soon approaching. He would have to disentangle himself and go to work, leaving Ryan alone again and Gavin just did _not_ want to do that today; he was too content here, too wrapped up in the moment to even think about getting out of bed. And why shouldn’t he enjoy this while it lasted? Good things like a beautiful man sleeping soundly in his arms didn’t come by very often.

But a small seed of guilt still rested in his chest – he was keeping things from Ryan; he didn’t deserve this wonderful thing. He was a liar. Ryan needed someone he could trust entirely, and while Gavin was enjoying this unearned faith, the other man deserved the truth. He did, and Gavin would tell him. Today.

During the last minute before his alarm, Gavin reveled in what he was sure were the last good moments he’d have for a long time. He cautiously extracted himself from Ryan so he could look at his face and gently stroked his arm with cautious fingers, marveling at how relaxed the other man’s face was. This was what true peace felt like, surely. He’d tell him about what he harbored inside himself this morning but for now, this was what really mattered.

He removed his hands seconds before the alarm rang. Ryan’s face scrunched up as he rolled it into his pillow, groaning quietly.

“Rise and shine, sleeping beauty,” Gavin said as he sat up, ignoring the small pinch in his heart.

Ryan groaned again, this time louder, the sound only muffled a little by the pillow.

“Yes yes, I know,” Gavin chuckled, feet already on the floor and taking him to the kitchen to start the coffee pot. “You can sleep in for a bit but the coffee will get cold eventually.”

The sound of Ryan shuffling around on the bed reached Gavin through the open bedroom door. “Why is it again that you have to get up at the absolute ass crack of dawn?”

“Duty calls!”

“Tell it to call back later.” The older man yawned loudly. “Don’t see why you can’t go into work at a normal, _sane_ hour like the rest of us.”

Gavin chuckled at the sight of a bedraggled Ryan shuffling down the hallway, hair all sorts of messy. “Not everyone has the pleasure of a nine to five, Ryan.”

The only reply he got from the older man was a massive yawn.

They passed the next half hour the same way they did pretty much every other morning; Gavin made the coffee, Ryan sat groggily at the counter till it was ready, and then they ate whatever breakfast they felt like that day. This morning it was toast with peanut butter and jam, a personal favorite of Ryan’s.

But the more time went on, the more nervous Gavin became. Instead of sitting next to Ryan, he’d stayed standing in the kitchen, legs restless. He needed to tell Ryan before he left for the Archives – he didn’t want to wait till he got home or he’d give himself too much time to chicken out. He had to do it _now_.

When Ryan got up to put their dishes into the dishwasher, Gavin pulled his coffee mug tight to his chest and took a steadying breath. “I need to tell you something.”

“Hmm?” Ryan didn’t turn around.

Gathering his strength, Gavin tried again. “Ryan, it’s important.”

Ryan turned, a look of slight concern on his face. “What is it?”

“I, er, haven’t been completely open about everything,” Gavin began, not quite sure how he wanted to go about this. “There’s something about me that I’ve kept from you that you deserve to know.”

“Are you sick?” Ryan sounded genuinely upset. He walked over to stand in front Gavin.

Why did that make him feel so much worse? “No, I’m not sick. Not, not really. I just-” He had to stop and take another moment to collect his thoughts. “When I first started working at the Archives, back when I was young and stupid and didn’t have a bloody clue what I was up against, I made the idiotic decision to go out and try to collect an artifact Geoff and I had been hunting down. We had a solid lead and I figured it’d look really cool if I went and collected it myself.”

Ryan looked confused but said nothing, so Gavin continued.

“The artifact was connected to an entity known as the Maze, the thing that lives in the feeling of loss – of being lost or losing something. This could be a physical thing or an intangible concept, like a memory or an emotion.”

“What happened to you? Did you lose something?”

Gavin knew he didn’t deserve the worry that Ryan so clearly had for him. “No, I actually gained something.”

“I thought you said the Maze had to do with loss?”

“It does.” Now Gavin was getting truly anxious. “The artifact was – it was a gem, see, a really shitty rock the color of piss, and it was way too easy to find but I didn’t even _think_ about that before I just snatched it right up.” He rubbed a tender spot at the base of his sternum. “Little thing got so hot I dropped it but it flew right into my chest, lodged itself between a couple ribs. I woke up in hospital with Geoff as livid as I’ve ever seen him, panicked as all hell. I felt fine, just a bit sore, but when he touched my arm – when he touched me it felt like something was being taken from me, like my energy was being sapped right out of my body.”

Now Ryan looked the tiniest bit scared, though whether it was Gavin or his story that caused it, Gavin couldn’t tell. “What about Geoff? Did he feel anything?”

“Oh yeah.” A humorless laugh escaped Gavin’s throat. “Said it felt like he’d touched dry ice, jerked back his hand real quick.” He set his coffee down and squared his shoulders. “It took us a long time to figure out what happened but best we could figure was the stone _infected_ me with the Maze, or at least some power related to it. I can...give people my energy, sort of. It’s at a loss to me, obviously, but it’s something. I can use it to give myself extra force during hunts, it just exhausts me every single time. I still don’t know the full extent of it, but...”

Here Gavin trailed off, Ryan’s expression steadily turning into that of betrayal.

“You – you had this inside you the whole time and you never said anything?”

Gavin flinched, the disappointment in Ryan’s oddly quiet voice stinging hard. “I couldn’t – you needed somebody to trust and, and – this _thing_ inside me wasn’t going to help that-” He couldn’t finish his sentence, the words getting stuck in his throat.

“No, Gavin, you not trusting me is what’s not going to help.” Ryan’s face was so full of conflicting emotions that Gavin had to look away. “What’s going on right now terrifies me beyond anything that’s ever happened and you _kn_ _o_ _w what it’s like_. You could have told me. I _trust_ you.”

The knot in Gavin’s stomach loosened just the tiniest bit; Ryan said ‘trust’, not ‘trusted’ – maybe there was still a chance for forgiveness. “I know, and I’m sorry, I should have said something, I just – I, I didn’t want to frighten you...”

Ryan didn’t say anything for a long time and Gavin could only hope that he understood that none of this was coming from a place of malice or neglect. The silence was almost physically painful.

“Gavin, look at me.” Ryan’s words were softer this time. Sad, but soft.

So he did. Ryan had moved closer, hands twitching at his sides and eyes full of questions. He didn’t look upset anymore, just confused. Gavin’s chest ached at the sight.

“You don’t scare me Gavin, not even now that I know you’ve got a, a _something_ in you too.” Carefully, he reached out a trembling hand to take one of Gavin’s. “I know why you did it, I’m just – I’m just sorry that you felt like you couldn’t say anything to me.”

Gavin’s heart broke. “No, Ryan, that’s not true – I wanted to tell you, so much, but you-” He took a deep breath and squeezed Ryan’s hand. “You deserve to feel safe. These entities are unpredictable – I don’t even really know what it is that I have, how could I make you feel comfortable with that when I don’t understand it enough to even explain to myself?”

There was a moment where Ryan just stared at him. Then, with a look of purpose on his face, he closed the gap between them and wrapped his arms around Gavin’s shoulders, tucking his face into the younger man’s neck. “I do feel safe. _You_ make me feel safe. You wouldn’t stay around me if you thought that you could hurt me, and I know that. I’m the dangerous one here.”

Gavin couldn’t move for several seconds. How could he be forgiven so quickly? He’d kept a hugely important part of his life hidden from the man he was trying to protect – a man he was beginning to care about deeply – and he was the one being comforted; it left him feeling twisted up inside.

“I’m so sorry,” he eventually said while wrapping his own arms round Ryan’s middle. “I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

They stood there for a while like that, just holding on. Ryan’s shaking subsided and the guilt that had been festering in Gavin’s chest slowly filtered out till it was just a small lump. It still amazed him how much the older man meant to him after only five months; he didn’t want to mess things up any more than he already had.

Ryan finally loosened his arms so he could lean back enough to look into Gavin’s eyes again. “Got anymore super powers I should know about?” There was a small smile on his face that warmed Gavin to his toes.

“Not unless you consider drinking six cups of coffee in three hours a super power.”

The light huff of laughter Ryan gave in response only furthered the heat spreading through Gavin’s body. The taller man continued to look into his eyes, flicking back and forth between them, and a spark of _something_ passed between their bodies. Gavin licked his bottom lip and Ryan’s gaze followed the action; he leaned a fraction closer and the air in the room got thinner and-

Gavin’s cell phone rang out through the apartment from the kitchen counter, startling the both of them. Ryan quickly let go and stepped back, a light flush across his cheeks and his hand rubbing the back of his neck. Clearing his throat, Gavin walked to his phone and picked it up – Michael was calling.

“I, uh, better take this,” he said apologetically. “Probably something about a case.”

Ryan looked away and nodded. “Yeah, sure, I’ll just-” And he walked into the living room, sat down, and turned on the TV.

Gavin answered his phone, eyes on the back of Ryan’s head. “This better be real important, boy.”

……..

“What the hell does any of this shit even mean?”

Michael’s tone had been acting like the world’s shittiest roller coaster all day, shifting up and down from intrigued to bored to frustrated and back again – for the past hour it’d been steadily in the latter’s court though, leaning towards fed up. He’d volunteered to help Gavin out in the lab while Matt was out doing some on-site work for Jack and apparently cleaning, transcribing, and reconstructing a really old book wasn’t on his list of things that he found enjoyable. Gavin couldn’t really blame him; the whole process was exceedingly tedious and time-consuming. It’d been months and there really hadn’t been that much in the way of a breakthrough.

“Well,” Gavin sighed. “At least we’re through the thick of it.” They’d successfully made it through over half of the _Ath-_ _t_ _hogail an Saoghal_ , piece by infuriating piece.

“You’ve got, like, at _least_ a full centimeter to go, Gav-”

“Not what I meant!”

Michael laughed. “Whatever.” He sat down in one of the lab chairs and rolled lazily over to where Gavin was pouring over the image of a particular page, one with a formerly detailed illustration of some sort of ritual, the water damage especially bad in that section of the book. “Any luck?”

“Not really.” Gavin had spent the last three hours attempting to trace and make sense of the picture, most of that time spent struggling to pick out individual pieces from its blurred splotches. “I think this has to do with the Throne’s final act but it’s bloody _impossible_ to see anything clearly.”

“ _When the Vessel is ready, the Gate will open_ _and the_ _reconstruction will begin_ ,” Michael quoted, voice teasing. “Too bad the damn thing doesn’t just tell us what the vessel is supposed to be.”

Gavin looked up from the magnification screen he was examining to rub his eyes with his palms. “Technically it’s ‘ship’; ‘ _an soitheach’_ literally translates as ‘ship’.”

“Yeah but that’s just semantics; I doubt the Throne is looking for a boat.”

“You can never really guess with these things, can you?”

Michael snorted. “Could you imagine? Great big arc filled with cultists, waiting for the void to whisk them away.”

It was Gavin’s turn to quote the book. “ _The Vessel wi_ _ll_ _open and the Destroyer will enter_.” He leaned back in his chair. “Better be a massive boat for the all talking up they do.”

They both shared a chuckle, taking the time to relax for a few moments before getting back to it. They’d been working since they arrived at the Archives over twelve hours before, the overtime not even registering – they were both so used to it at this point, and highly invested in the project at hand. Between the two of them, a lot had actually been accomplished too; several new pages had been translated, a full page illustration had been electronically restored, and Michael had even managed to cross-reference some of the items mentioned in the book with those in storage with the mark of the Throne on them. Said items were currently lined up along the counter against the wall, though their exact significance was yet to be determined outside of them being connected to other entities.

It didn’t feel like much in the grand scheme of things but Gavin tried to see the progress for what it was. Things weren’t just going to magically fall into place; they were going to have to work hard to get the answers they needed. Cracking the _Ath-_ _t_ _hogail an Saoghal_ was going to take a lot of time and effort and there was no way around that simple fact.

Like with every other case he’d worked on, Gavin threw himself head first into this one, spending countless hours scouring reference materials and working through the book. He had a special interest, he supposed, and might be a little overly-invested at this point, but overall it was a topic he’d already been curiosity of. So when he’d finished up with the last chunk of other casework and files, Geoff had granted him permission to put all of his energy into the Crimson Throne investigation. Which is what led him here, sitting in a lab five floors underground with his best friend, staring blankly at a ruined illustration that looked more like a Rorschach test than anything useful.

“Here, why don’t you take a crack at this stupid picture; I think my eyes might fall out my head if I look at it for a second longer.” With a groan, Gavin stood up to stretch his cramped legs.

Michael shrugged and swapped places with him, Gavin taking his place in front of several different print outs of pages they hadn’t gotten to yet. Another hour passed like this, the two of them lost in their own work, only pausing every once in a while to ask a quick question or make a comment, moving around each other with ease. They were an excellent team for many reasons but their ability to function like a well-oiled machine was one of the biggest. But even with this skill Gavin found nothing new of value. Nearing nine o’clock, he began to dearly hope that today wouldn’t be another disappointment.

Luckily, it seemed like Michael wasn’t done making vital discoveries.

“Hey Gav?”

“Hm?”

“What does ‘ _an bodhaig_ ’ mean? It’s not in the handy-dandy little book of words you gave me.”

After a while, Gavin had created a small notebook full of the more common words and phrases used in the _Ath-_ _t_ _hogail an Saoghal_ and Michael had become quite proficient in his Gaelic pronunciation. “Is that with a ‘gh’ or a ‘dh’?” He rolled to his other computer and pulled up the translation software.

“B-o-d-h-a-i-g,” Michael spelled out.

“Means ‘the body’,” Gavin read. “What’s it from?”

When Gavin looked over at his friend, Michael’s brow was heavily furrowed. “It’s written, right here, under the main image. In tiny ass print.”

Sure enough, upon inspection with the large illuminated magnification panel Michael had attached to the table, Gavin saw the tiny lettering underneath the illustration; he must have completely missed it during his examination. There were other words though too, ones that he recognized on sight.

“’ _An bodhaig an t-soithich_ ’,” he read under his breath. “The body of the Vessel...”

“This whole thing is a depiction of a ritual, Gav, with a _person_ at its center.”

Gavin’s skin began to crawl. “A person?”

“Yeah.” Michael pointed to the live display screen where he’d zoomed in on the middle of the picture, washed out lines bleeding into each other in a way that swam before Gavin’s eyes. But if he focused, now that he had an idea of what he should be looking for, it became clear that it was indeed the figure of a human standing at the center of a crowd of others. “I think the Vessel is a human, not some inanimate container.”

And that made sense, didn’t it? Having some object for an otherworldly entity to inhabit was one thing but giving it a home that it could possibly control and act through? Infinitely better. But who would the Throne want as their god puppet?

“Fits, doesn’t it?” Michael continued. “Put ol’ Ichthis in a meat suit and set him loose – seems like that aligns with filling a vessel and starting the apocalypse.”

“But what constitutes as the right vessel? How do they determine who gets to be the meat suit?”

“Dunno, book just says they have to be ‘ready’.”

A thought suddenly hit Gavin, a memory of Ryan’s terrified voice after he’d been attacked by the Throne cultists. _They said I wasn’t ready and they’d be back_. A cold trickle of panic began to seep down his spine. Ryan, who had been connected to the Throne since birth; Ryan, who almost drowned in black ichor while dreaming about being consumed by shadows; Ryan, who the Throne themselves had sought out only a few months ago. _They said I wasn’t ready_.

“It’s Ryan.”

Michael raised his eyebrow in question. “What?”

“The Vessel isn’t just anybody, Michael – the Vessel is _Ryan_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm always up for a screaming match on [Tumblr](http://toasterness.tumblr.com) <3


	9. Infection

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a general Body Horror warning for this chapter. I'm not going to bother saying when and where because it's pretty much the whole thing.

Gavin didn’t bother with the elevator and instead took the stairs two at a time as he ran up the flights to the main office floor, practically falling over himself in his hurry to Geoff’s office. He could hear Michael right behind him.

“Is everything ok?” Lindsay looked up alarmed at their approach. She must have been waiting for Michael to finish up so they could go home.

“We need to talk to Geoff _now_.” Gavin wasted no time in slamming Geoff’s office door open; he knew the man would be in there despite the late hour.

The door hitting the inside wall caused the director of the Archives to jump in his seat, hand going to his heart. “Fuck!”

“We’ve figured out what it is,” Michael panted from behind Gavin, both of them breathing heavily. “Well, Gavin figured it out but that doesn’t matter because shit is so _fucked_.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Michael?”

With rapid fingers, Gavin sent a text to Ryan saying that he’d be home soon (and didn’t that feel nice, calling it home instead of just his flat?) and that they really needed to talk. “It’s the Crimson Throne case; I – _we_ think that Ryan is the Vessel the book keeps talking about.”

Geoff’s raised his eyebrows, elbows on his desk with his fingers steepled. “Ryan Haywood? The same Ryan Haywood that is currently staying in your apartment? The same Ryan Haywood I explicitly stated should be housed here, at the Archives, till we could figure out what was going on with him and how he was involved?” Gavin winced and nodded. “Have you told him?”

“I just sent him a text but I’m going to call him as soon as we’re done here” He ran his hands through his already messy hair, agitation making his nostrils flare. “I need to go home, I need to make sure he’s safe-”

“We need to bring him in.” Geoff’s voice was stern and his face even more so as he stared intensely at Gavin. “Immediately, Agent Free.”

Gavin felt Michael’s hand on his shoulder as the Brit cringed at the use of his formal title. “Yes sir.”

“He shouldn’t have been left alone in the first place.”

“We didn’t know-”

“I told you this from the beginning, Gavin, the Throne is dangerous! And this new information just means that Mr. Haywood is a similar threat!” The older man sighed and slumped in his chair, his anger dulling slightly. “You will go home, pack his shit up, and bring him back here, do I make myself clear?”

“Yes sir.”

Geoff flattened his hands on his desk, his eyes softening a bit. “And be careful, ok? I don’t like the sound of any of this.”

Quickly looking at his phone and seeing that Ryan hadn’t responded, Gavin grimaced. “Neither do I.” He looked back up at Geoff. “I swear, I didn’t see any of this coming-”

“What are you waiting for then, go! Call him!” Geoff interrupted.

Gavin did just that. He gave Geoff one last appreciative nod and then he went back into the hall, cell phone at his ear. He heard Michael filling Lindsay in from behind him. Not for the first time, Gavin was glad to have such loyal friends on his side, especially those as skilled, understanding, and intelligent as those who worked at the Archives with him; he knew he couldn’t do any of this without them.

The feeling that something bad was happening settled into Gavin’s stomach when Ryan didn’t answer his call. It was eerily similar to the night the Throne first attacked. Gavin checked his phone to make sure that he had a signal – he did – and tried again. Still, there was no answer. Dread continued to grow for every ring and Gavin started to panic; Ryan always answered his phone – he kept it by his side all day, especially when Gavin wasn’t home, so that they could easily communicate. Belatedly, Gavin realized that Ryan hadn’t texted him that night to ask him when he would be getting back and that was something he always did if the Brit wasn’t already home by eight o’clock.

Ryan picked up on the third try.

“ _Hello Gavin_.”

Immediately, Gavin could tell that something was off; Ryan’s voice sounded wrong. On the other end of the line, car horns blared in the distance. “What’s going on? Are you ok?”

“ _Everything is fine._ ”

Gavin’s chest filled with dread at Ryan’s oddly flat voice. “No, everything is definitely not fine; what did you do?”

“ _Nothing, Gavin, I just felt like taking a walk._ ” He sounded groggy, like he sometimes did when he woke up too early.

Terror gripped Gavin and he bolted for the stairs, Michael’s cry of alarm and his and Lindsay’s following footsteps echoing up the stairwell behind him. They reached the Institute lobby in record time. Gavin’s chestburned and his words were coming out choppy, his lungs working overtime. “Did you talk to anybody else, Ryan? Did you hear the voices again?”

“ _Oh yes, they’re here_ ,” Ryan said calmly. But his next words came out almost unsure. “ _Am I dreaming again? They only talk to me on the beach_.”

Something had a hold of Ryan, that was for sure. Gavin just had to figure out a way to reach the real Ryan, the one clearly trapped in his own head. It was like the older man was reenacting his nightmares without realizing it.

“Ryan, where are you?”

The was a pause before Ryan responded. “ _I-_ ” Another break, this one filled with a sharp exhale. “ _I don’t know_.”

Gavin could barely get his words out between his deep breaths as he ran. “Describe to me what you see.”

“ _I see...lights-_ ” Ryan made a noise that sounded an awful lot like a whimper. “ _Gavin, I can’t stop walking-_ ” Now his voice sounded like his own. He sounded afraid.

“Shit,” Gavin whispered under his breath. He stopped and turned around to see Michael and Lindsay hot on his heels as they all ran out the front doors, addressing them with a tone saturated in alarm. “I think it’s starting.” Why did they keep figuring things out at the literal last possible moment?

“The ritual?!” Michael’s face went white.

Ryan began to breath heavily. “ _Gavin,_ _what_ _-_ ”

“It’s going to be ok, Ryan, I’m going to get you, alright?”

Lindsay grabbed Michael’s arm. “I think there’s some things down in storage that could help us. You should call Jeremy.”

“You think there’s gonna be some sort of _fight?_ ” Michael exclaimed.

His wife nodded. “You said the Vessel was the center point of a big, shitty ritual, so you can bet your ass there will be cultists involved in some capacity.” She started pulling Michael back towards the building, key card in hand. “I know for a fact that some of the stuff down in collections can be used against them. Now call Jeremy!”

Michael gave Gavin one last look before following Lindsay back into the Institute. “As soon as you figure out where he is, let us know!”

With an acknowledging wave, Gavin started running again in the direction of the small parking garage where his car was.

“Ryan, I need you to keep talking to me, ok? Tell me what you see around you.”

“ _Something – something is happening to me, Gavin, I can feel it._ ”

Gavin’s stomach twisted. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, I promised that, remember? You’re going to stay _you_.”

“ _I can’t stop walking,_ ” Ryan whispered. “ _And I can feel – I can feel things_ changing _in me._ ”

Frustration mixed with worry inside Gavin’s head. “Shit, Ryan, what do you see!”

Ryan grunted as if in pain. “ _It’s so dark._ _There are a lot of, of warehouses,_ _I think_ _?_ ”

“Good, good, keep going.” Gavin finally reached his car. He wrenched the door open and dropped into the driver’s seat, not bothering to buckle up, just starting the car and peeling out as soon as he could.

“ _I can hear water._ ” There was a new strain to Ryan’s voice. “ _It smells like salt._ ”

All that could only suggest one place in the city – the docks.Putting caution to the wind, Gavin pulled his phone away from his ear long enough to send a message to Michael about where he was headed.

“I know where you are, Ryan.”

About fifteen minutes from the apartment, there were old ship docks where cargo had once been dealt with but that now only served as a decrepit backdrop for dozens of massive empty warehouses. Gavin almost laughed – what a perfectly cliché ritual location. He was about to ask Ryan for more details but an unfamiliar voice filtered through from the other line, muffled and slightly hard to understand.

“ _Come, Vessel, we have been waiting..._ ”

“ _Gavin, the people from my apartment, they’re here._ ” Ryan sounded like he was choking on his own air.

A wave of nausea rolled over Gavin. “I’m coming Ryan, I’m on my way – you have to try and resist them!”

“ _Everything has been prepared for you..._ ” This was another new voice.

“ _I’m sorry, I can’t-_ ” There was the sound of liquid splashing and something cracking; Ryan cried out. “ _Gavin, please-_ ”

And then the line went dead.

“Shit!” Gavin slammed his palms on the steering wheel. “ _Shit!!_ ”

Hands shaking, he called Michael.

……..

Everything was like in his nightmares – cool wind, pitch black, the sound of water. Even the voices were there. But unlike in his dreams, Ryan wasn’t in control of where his body went. On the imaginary beach, he could stop when he wanted; it was how he allowed the shadows to enter his body, after all. Here, in this place, he had no input as to what his body did or where it went. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t stop walking towards the voices.

He’d been sitting on the couch watching TV while waiting for Gavin to get home when it happened; his head had filled with fog and everything went all crooked and dark. Next thing he knew, he was outside, walking in what seemed like complete darkness, totally calm. It was like sleep walking, almost. And then Gavin had called and Ryan had answered and he slowly became aware of how absolutely deceitful everything was.

Suddenly he saw lights, tinted with shadows. He could hear waves and smell salt, could see the vague outline of massive square buildings. Ryan tried as hard as he could to describe to Gavin where he was but fear and pain clouded his mind. He’d tried to tell the Brit what was happening but how does someone explain the feeling of their bones shifting so their skin feels too tight, or their teeth growing quickly inside their mouth, or their spine breaking and reforming dozens of times over?

It wasn’t until the figures appeared that Ryan fully understood what was happening – they were the same ones that had assaulted him in his home, the ones whose voices echoed in his mind every time he was awoken from a nightmare. They were the ones calling him forward and he could do nothing but approach them on legs that didn’t feel like his own. Gavin’s voice was no longer in his ear and Ryan felt the phantom hands begin to clamber over him, pulling him into the circle of cultists. He tried to yell out but all he could produce was a low moan. The Throne members just laughed in unison.

“ **Welcome, Vessel. It is time to receive your destiny**.”

……..

It took Gavin twelve minutes to drive to the docks; twelve minutes of reckless driving and talking with Michael over the phone, trying to figure out the best plan of action. Jeremy had been looped in and the two of them along with Lindsay were now also en route, accompanied by a small arsenal of various artifacts from the Archives that held some power. Gavin urgently hoped that they would be helpful in some way.

The whole way there, he kicked himself for not realizing sooner that Ryan was at the literal center of it all. How could he have missed that? How did he look past all of the signs, all of the clues that now seemed so obvious? There had been so many chances for him to figure it out and yet he’d allowed himself be distracted, caught up in everything that Ryan was and how he made Gavin feel. And now everything was going to shit and it was all his fault.

Gavin felt it before he even parked at the docks – a powerful, sickening energy that caused his stomach to clench. He could see a low green light coming from behind a warehouse so he parked in front of the building, jerking open the car door and leaping out, not bothering to turn the ignition off before he was running in the direction of the glow. Heart pounding, he rounded the corner and immediately slammed into what he would have called a wall if he could see anything. But there was nothing there, just empty air that felt solid when he struck it with his fist. Gavin looked beyond the invisible wall and cursed loudly at what he saw.

A large crowd of cloaked figures, at least fifty or more, were amassed in a densely packed circle, surrounding whatever was making that weird green light. At the sound of Gavin striking the barrier, they all turned as one in his direction, their faces hidden by their black hoods. Several of them parted a few feet so he could see within their throng; they spread their arms out widely as if to say _look, look what we have taken from you_. Gavin almost fell to his knees – at the center of the ring of cultists was Ryan.

He was covered in black ichor again but this time it seeped from within him, undulating out from his skin in writhing tentacles of oily darkness in a sick imitation of the arms of a squid. Ryan was held aloft by these tendrils with his arms and legs spread wide and pulled taught. Gavin watched in horror as the largest of the appendages reared up and plunged down Ryan’s throat, pulsing as it invaded the man’s struggling body, his throat stretching around the intrusion.

Gavin tasted vomit at the back of his throat at the vile imagery. “Ryan!” He screamed, heedless of the cloaked figures surrounding the other man as he slammed his fist into the barrier over and over again. “ _Ryan!_ ”

With eyes as dark as the sludge holding him, Ryan turned his head just enough to look back at Gavin, slimy tears dripping down his cheeks. Even with his irises completely taken over, he still managed to look terrified, pain written all over his face. Gavin took a stuttering step forward when he saw one of Ryan’s hands stretch towards him but the force field stopped him.

“ **You will not interfere** ,” the figures said in unison.

“Fuck you!” Gavin spat, body tensing; he let the light burning at his center begin to brighten, to spread, to reach out through his body. “Let him go!”

“ **The seed has already been planted. The Vessel is ready to receive Him**.”

Anger like he had never known rushed through Gavin. “What the _fuck_ did you do to him?”

“ **The Vessel has been prepared. Soon the** **true** **Gate will open and** **the** **Prince of Slaughter will arrive.** ” Another massive tentacle separated from the black mass and slammed into Ryan’s stomach, penetrating his flesh like it was nothing and making him convulse violently. “ **We have waited for decades for this Vessel,** **stolen from us** **but found again,** **c** **reated for the sole purpose of housing He Who Devours**.”

Gavin was so full of white hot fury that he almost missed the sound of running footsteps behind him and several voices calling out. Without thought, he forced the energy pulsating in his limbs outward, pressed his hands against the unseeable wall, and _pushed._ He felt the familiar pinch of exhaustion behind his eyes but kept his focus on willing the wall to, quite literally, _get lost_.

“What the fuck is going on?!” Michael exclaimed.

Teeth clenched, Gavin pushed harder. “They’ve started the ritual, they’re calling for Ichthis, but they’ve put up some god damned force field and I _can’t bloody get to him!_ ”

“Jesus fuck,” Jeremy said with a gag. “What’s happening to him?”

“They’re preparing his body, getting it ready to hold the entity.” Gavin grunted as he gathered more of his power and forced it out. His arms were beginning to feel weak. “His body is being mutated in order to accommodate whatever the hell Ichthis _is_.”

Michael growled. “Those sick fucks!”

“Can you break through?” Lindsay said calmly, her hand coming to rest on Gavin’s shoulder. “Can we help in any way?”

Sweat was beginning to break out on Gavin’s brow. “I don’t know, I’m _trying_ but I don’t even know how they made it-” He couldn’t finish his sentence, a sudden stabbing pain behind his eyes causing him to cry out.

Lindsay’s hand tightened briefly before letting go. “We brought some things – an Eye of Veros, that weird bleeding sword you and Michael picked up last year – Geoff called it the Sword of Vices? – the spider gloves, and a locking chime – can you use any of that right now?”

“I don’t think so, at least not until I get this damn wall out of the way.”

An obsidian marble that charms people who look at it; a sword that constantly drips blood yet still craves more; amethyst-studded gloves that felt the vibration of energies; a tuning fork that locked doors. It wasn’t much, and Gavin couldn’t really think at that moment how they would help in this exact situation, but he felt comfort and strength with his friends at his back. Together there was hope that they could stop the ritual and get Ryan back.

Then he felt it, the tiniest crack in the wall, an absence of what was once right under his fingertips. It was working! A few of the cultists visibly twitched as if they could feel the fissures forming. If he could just slip his fingers into the tiny flaws -

There! Gavin’s hand suddenly ripped through the barrier, the momentum causing his body to stumble forward a few steps. But he was through! The cringing figures wildly threw their hands up in frustration, shouting in an unintelligible language – they knew Gavin had broken through. Though he wanted to run straight for Ryan, he had to take a few seconds to heave in several deep breaths, hands on his knees to hold his upper body up. Lindsay was back at his side in an instant, hands gripping his arms in support. A dozen or so cultists separated from the main group and began rushing at them.

Gavin inhaled deeply and turned to his companions. “It’s open!”

“Bring it on, motherfuckers!” Michael roared as he ran to meet them, bloody sword raised in both hands.

Jeremy was right behind him, gloved hands stretched out at his sides, palms out, the tuning fork hanging around his neck. “I’m gonna find the gate.”

Gavin watched his friends confront the cultists, his every nerve on edge. Standing up, he shook his head to clear it as best he could, the fog of weariness creeping in. Lindsay’s strong hold gave him comfort enough to start moving himself forward.

“Use the Eye and draw as many as you can away from Ryan,” he instructed Lindsay. “I’m going to try and give him enough energy to pull himself out.”

The concern was clear in Lindsay’s expression as she let go and pulled out the Eye. “Be careful, Gavin; don’t push too hard.”

“I’ve got to help him, Linds; it’s my fault he’s here.”

“It’s nobody’s fault but the Throne’s, got it?” Her tone implied there would be no arguing. With one last weighted look, she stepped away. “Now go get your man.”

Gavin began walking, circling around the fighting so he could get a better view of Ryan; he needed a clear shot but too many of the cultists were in his way. It took a few minutes but he was eventually able to move so he could properly see Ryan. The urge to throw up at what he saw was strong – the human body wasn’t built to do the things the other man was going through.

Ryan’s face was contorted in agony, his flesh splitting to allow new eyes to open on his forehead, cheeks, and all over the rest of his body, each one just as black as the last. Gavin watched helplessly as the other man jerked into odd angles, the sound of cracking bones practically deafening in his ears. Black veins stretched under Ryan’s skin like grotesque worms while more and more dark shadows spilled from underneath him and tangled themselves with the ooze. The sky directly above him crackled with dark lightening, the clouds low and roiling like the open ocean.

It was obvious that time was running out and that Gavin needed to do something and do it fast, before he completely drained himself, so he reached his hands out and called forth the Maze’s power once again and directed it all towards Ryan. He knew it hit its target when the other man seized up completely, body stiff and unmoving within the slithering mass. Gavin continued to push, the cultists surrounding Ryan huddling closer and closer, trying to block him from view. But Gavin didn’t give up.

Behind the mass of cultists, Gavin watched as Jeremy moved his hands around in the air as if he was grabbing onto invisible spider webs, the gloves giving him the ability to sense powerful energies. It appeared as if he’d found something, the fingers of his left hand now gripping onto an unseen point. He lifted the tuning fork with his other hand and hit it against whatever he had found. The resulting explosive sound made Gavin think that the gate had been discovered and Jeremy was working on closing and locking it. All the while, Michael fought nearby, cutting down any cultists he could.

Slowly, just like Gavin liked to wake him from his nightmares, Ryan began to fight back. He started thrashing about more vigorously, grasping at the tendrils and pulling till they ripped, the sharp claws that his hands had become dealing massive damage. The cloaked figures around him began chanting, sickly green light radiating from their hands in an attempt to halt any progress. Despite this, Ryan was eventually able to reject the tentacle invading his throat, mouth snarling with razor sharp teeth stained black. If he wasn’t so preoccupied with trying to stay up despite how weak he could feel his body becoming, Gavin might have been petrified by the sight. But he wasn’t in his right mind; he was too focused on transferring his energy.

He was so stuck in his concentration, in fact, that he completely missed the five cultists that approached him from the left. It wasn’t until one of them grabbed his outstretched arm that Gavin realized they were even there. He was ripped from his task and all of fatigue he’d been previously ignoring hit him like a train, his body rapidly shutting down. The hand gripping his wrist burned, sending excruciating pain shooting up his arm and blackness rapidly began encroaching on his vision; he cried out in agony as he tried to pull away from the touch, eyes searching out Ryan’s.

The other man had managed to extract himself from the ichor the rest of the way by himself and was now staring right at him, panic clear even on his distorted features.

“ _Gavin_!” He bellowed, voice harsh and inhuman.

It was the last thing Gavin heard before he succumbed to the darkness.

……..

Gavin’s body hit the ground and Ryan snapped.

His already deteriorating human form slipped further and he felt his bones crack as everything about him _shifted._ The weird shadows coming from him rose from the ground and solidified into an inky miasma, otherworldly eyes opening throughout and staring in all different directions. His mouth widened and his teeth elongated even more and he could no longer think about anything except destroying everything in the way of his path towards Gavin.

He – no, _It_ – barely registered the screams of the cultists around him as it ripped through their throats with unnaturally sharp fangs and claws. Thick black veins continued to spread over its skin, intensifying more and more for every corpse that fell around it. Its physical shadow manifestation spread out around it body, picking up and throwing any cultists who made the mistake of trying to approach.

It was a massacre; blood sprayed all over the ground and walls of the surrounding buildings, soaking everything in sticky crimson. It would have retched at the overwhelming smell of iron and copper but it wasn’t human anymore, couldn’t form coherent thoughts beyond _kill kill kill_. Voices were screaming around it and it took no notice, its feral mind so honed in on reaching Gavin’s motionless body and devouring the beings that stood over him.

And yet even when it reached the Brit, its body remained in its transformed state. In fact, it was worsening; the miasma was multiplying, the dark veins were still spreading and pulsing, and its tongue had started to grow too long for its mouth, spilling out to lick up the blood on its face. Even its mind continued to change, blacking out everything that wasn’t _rage_. It made easy work of the cultists, their blood only feeding its fury.

Out of the corner of its eye – the ones on its face, not the ones opening all over the rest of its body – the thing formally known as Ryan saw two figures approaching from several yards away. In the far reaches of its mind, the words ‘Jeremy’ and ‘Michael’ floated around, but they were swiftly overcome by a swell of pure aggression and hate. It would add them to the piles of bodies surrounding them; it would bleed them dry, consume their very essence. It would –

Something touched the skin of its wrist – a hand. A slender, cold hand. It tried to rear back, ready to attack, but something stopped it, something cool and electric flowing into it from the contact.

It was…

It couldn’t…

It couldn’t move, muscles frozen.

……

It had taken all of the remaining strength in his body for Gavin to sit up and grab Ryan’s wrist. Every single one of his muscles screamed with the effort and his head pounded. But he had still somehow mustered just a _little_ more of his power to stop Ryan from killing Michael and Jeremy – because there was no doubt in his mind that the older man would have done so, given the chance; he was too far gone.

“Stay back!” He screamed at his friends.

He saw Michael’s brows come together in a scowl. “No way, shithead! You’re coming with us!”

“No! I have to do this alone!” Gavin forced himself to stand up, never letting go of Ryan’s wrist. “If I let go, he’ll tear us all to pieces!”

The other two reluctantly stopped advancing, faces strained and bodies taught as they stood several yards away. Behind them, Lindsay had several cultists enthralled by the Eye of Veros but her gaze was directed over to him, eyes wide. Gavin made himself turn back and put all of his attention on Ryan; the gent was snarling and pulling against the invisible bonds that held him. The shadow arms flailing around him cut Gavin’s skin and burned on contact but he somehow managed to maintain control. He tried to look Ryan in the eyes, his real eyes, but they were just black voids, glowing slightly green around the edges.

Gavin reached his free hand up to cup the side of Ryan’s face; there was no reaction from the other except more growls, his body frozen.

“Ryan, look at me,” Gavin pleaded in a soft voice.

Ryan snarled back and snapped his teeth, blackish blood beginning to leak from where his eyes were supposed to be like perverse tears. The black veins began invading his face.

“Please Ryan _, come back to me_.”

Nothing.

So it had come to this.

Gavin took a deep breath and closed the space between them to press their foreheads together. He forced whatever power remained in him through their contact and Ryan closed his mouth, sickening tongue slipping back inside, his face slackening slightly. It was now or never, so Gavin leaned in a little more and kissed him.

…….

There was something … wrong.

No, something was _right_.

It felt like a person. A human.

It felt like a he.

But what was happening to him? What was this feeling spreading through him? It was … cold. Cold but – hot? No, no, it hurt like burning but was so so _cold_. And there were –

Lips. On his – a kiss.

Gavin.

Oh, god, _Gavin_.

And then Ryan was wrapping his arms around the younger man, holding him close and returning the kiss. Gavin smelled like sweat and ozone and that subtle cologne he liked to wear and it overwhelmed Ryan’s senses in the best possible way, permeating his mind through the thick fog of _otherness_ that had taken over. He could feel his bones and teeth and fingers going back to normal and knew without seeing that the black veins and thick shadows were receding. It felt good, so good he deepened the kiss.

It was like taking a deep breath after being underwater for too long; it was like a cool drink of water after not drinking for days; it was like every single warm smile that Gavin had given him since they’d met and then some. Perhaps Ryan had died and this was his punishment – to finally have what he wanted when it was already too late.

Eventually, the electricity flowing into him slowed, then stopped. Ryan pulled back to look at the man in his arms.

Gavin smiled weakly, his self-inflicted strain clearly taking its toll. “There you are.” Suddenly his legs gave out and Ryan had to lower them both to the ground carefully.

“I’m sorry,” Ryan roughly whispered, Gavin slumped heavily into him. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“You could never hurt me.”

“I could have though! What if I did? What if I’d hurt Jeremy or Michael or-”

“ _But you didn’t._ ” Gavin looked focused but drawn, his eyes tired and his skin pale. “I should be the one apologizing; I failed you. I told you I’d keep you safe, keep the thing inside you from taking over – I’m _so sorry_ , Ryan-”

“Sh, sh, it’s ok,” Ryan breathed as he put their foreheads back together. “It’s alright, I know you tried.”

Gavin closed his eyes and let his hands drop from Ryan’s face. “I won’t fail you again.”

And then his body went slack in Ryan’s arms.

“Gavin?” No response. “Gavin, can you hear me?”

Panic raced through him. He tried to find a pulse but only found a very slow, very faint beat. He looked up, desperately looking for Michael and Jeremy; they were already rushing towards him, Michael chucking the gory blade in his hands on the ground as he ran.

Ryan felt himself shaking. “Help me!” He begged.

Michael reached them first with his arms out. “Give him to me.”

It felt so wrong to let go but Ryan reluctantly placed Gavin into Michael’s arms. “I don’t understand, what happened? Where are you taking him?”

“He burned himself out,” the other man spat, fury on his face as he turned to sprint away with Gavin. “I’m taking him the fuck away from _you_.”

Guilt crashed into him as Ryan watched them leave. He was being crushed by it, drowned in it; the hopelessness radiated in his flesh and pulled him down so his hands were splayed on the ground and his head was tipped forward. Michael’s words cut deep and he wanted to scream that it wasn’t true, that he wasn’t dangerous and it wasn’t really him that had done any of this but he couldn’t – that would have been a lie.

He looked up to stare after the retreating figures, Jeremy staying behind to stand a few feet from him. He saw Lindsay, holding a marble in her extended hand, with at least ten cultists kneeling in front of her. Michael kicked the sword to lay at her feet and said something as he passed; she picked up the weapon and turned to the cultists with a set jaw and murder in her eyes.

“What the hell happened, Ryan,” Jeremy asked cautiously.

Ryan looked over at him, heart in his throat. “I – I don’t know, that’s never happened before! Something is inside me and it’s evil and it hurts and I don’t know how to control it-” the rest of his sentence ended in a choked sob. “Jeremy, what’ve I _done_?”

For a second, Ryan thought Jeremy might hit him, or worse, just leave him there alone, but he didn’t; instead his crossed arms fell to his sides and his posture went slack. He just looked tired.

“Nothing that you could’ve predicted,” he eventually said “You were Overtaken. Gavin told us about the, the _thing_ inside you, and there wasn’t anything you could have done to stop this.”

“What?”

Jeremy shifted, suddenly looking nervous, gaze shifting anywhere that wasn’t Ryan. “We didn’t even know you were the Vessel till like forty five minutes ago-”

“I’m the _what?!_ ”

Ryan’s head was swimming; Gavin had told him about the Vessel, how it was the key to bringing the Reconstruction to fruition and how hard they were working on finding out what it was. How could _he_ be the Vessel? What had he ever done to deserve something like that?

“Ryan, you have to believe me when I say that we just thought you’d been Marked or something, infected with an entity like Gavin but worse.” Ryan watched Jeremy swallow thickly, visibly uneasy. “Before we knew you were the Vessel, we had Matt do a little more digging behind Gavin’s back, even looked over his notes on that stupid book to see if we could learn anything about what’s got its hooks in you – the Prince of Slaughter is bad, really bad, and we knew it was only a matter of time before it all got too much for you. And then you had that nightmare and we thought it might be getting worse and-” He looked up with guilt in his eyes. “Gavin didn’t know about our suspicions.”

Everything was building up too fast for Ryan to keep up with. “So what you’re saying is that you thought all along that I would eventually break down and you didn’t _say_ anything?” The other man grimaced but nodded. “What the hell, Jeremy! I could have hurt you! I could have hurt _Gavin_!” Ryan’s voice became hysterical. He swept his arms around to indicate all of the bloody corpses littering the docks. “Look what I’m capable of! You should have told him and locked me up!”

“Ryan, listen-”

“You should have _killed me_!”

There was silence between the two of them. Ryan’s eyes burned as he stared Jeremy down, pleading. He wasn’t even sure what he was asking for – maybe a sign that this was all some sort of sick joke or that not everything was lost. There was a blankness in his chest that he couldn’t handle.

“Ryan, I-” Jeremy cleared his throat and took a step closer. He put a hand tentatively on Ryan’s arm. “I’m sorry,” he said with a voice laced in regret. “We were stupid; we thought we could control it or find a cure or _something_ , but we didn’t even have a clue what was really going on. Not everything made sense and there wasn’t a guarantee of anything, just speculation about the entity and how it was affecting you. We didn’t tell Gav because we just weren’t _sure,_ and he’s so protective of you and wouldn’t have let us come near if he thought we wanted to do anything to harm you or take you away.”

Ryan closed his eyes tightly. “You should have tried anyway.”

“He cares about you, man; he’s been talking about you for _weeks_ , worried sick that you’d drown in your sleep or something equally as disturbing. He burnt himself out for you, for fuck’s sake – we didn’t stand a chance against that.”

There was a flare of something familiar in his gut as Ryan opened his eyes, the same feeling he got whenever he caught Gavin looking at him sometimes with that soft expression on his face. Pride, maybe, at being the person to cause such a reaction, but guilt too; he knew that without this strange bond they had, Gavin wouldn’t have put himself in such danger.

“What do I do now?” His voice shook slightly. “What’s to say I won’t snap again?”

“I don’t know,” Jeremy admitted. “We have no idea how to deal with whatever’s inside you, especially now that we’ve seen what it can do. I guess it’s nice to know how it manifests but that’s not really all that comforting.”

Ryan took a deep breath.

“I just need to know that Gavin’s going to be ok.”

There was a deep sadness in Jeremy’s answering gaze. “I can’t promise you that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm always available to chat on [Tumblr](http://toasterness.tumblr.com)!


	10. Something Like Forgiveness

Jeremy dropped Ryan off at Gavin’s apartment with instructions that he was to clean up, get packed, and be ready to leave again in two hours. The shorter man would be waiting in the car outside. _You’re coming back to the Archives_ , he’d said firmly. Ryan couldn’t argue.

The interior of the flat was exactly as he’d left it earlier that night – a blanket carelessly pooled on the floor of the living room, half-full coffee cup sitting on the side table, TV still on at a low volume. Working mostly on autopilot, Ryan mechanically began to clean up, folding the blanket and turning the TV off, washing the mug and putting it on the drying rack. For a few minutes, it was normal, like he was simply waiting for Gavin to come home from work. Then he remembered that he was still covered in the carnage that he had wrought and what he was in the apartment to do originally, so he walked slowly to the bathroom, intent on washing up before packing but not quite willing to face reality yet.

He reluctantly turned on the light and caught his reflection in the mirror, almost not recognizing himself; he looked terrifying, eyes still pitch black with trails of dried blood striped down his face. More blood stained every inch of his clothes and arms, making him look like he had devil skin. Why hadn’t Gavin been afraid? Acid rose in his throat at the thought of the other man.

Growling, he ripped off his clothes, chucking them into the far corner of the bathroom, a seething guilt rushing through him. He turned the shower on full blast and stepped under its spray before it had a chance to heat up. Ruddy water ran down his body and collected on the floor, a bloody reflection of the night he almost drowned in blackness. Finally, as he violently scrubbed at his skin in an attempt to rid himself of the red stains left behind, Ryan let the tears fall.

The sobs ripped unbidden out of his throat, jagged and gasping. He let out an anguished roar that would surely frighten the neighbors but he didn’t care; he needed to get it all out, release the sorrow that was sitting so heavy in his chest and weighing him down. He yelled and he yelled and he yelled till his voice was hoarse and he began to feel light-headed, his whole body shaking despite the now scalding water.

He deserved this pain, deserved to feel like shit and to suffer the way he was suffering – monsters like him don’t get to be happy. And he was a monster now, wasn’t he? No matter Gavin’s assurances, Ryan had slaughtered dozens of people tonight without a second thought, mutated into whatever the hell he was, a caricature of a man drawn by a sadistic creator. He was no longer the same Ryan Haywood as he had been before; he didn’t have the words to describe the thing that he had become.

Suddenly, he was overcome with the image of himself as that terrifying creature with too long limbs and too many teeth, causing him to leap out of the shower to kneel on the ground and vomit into the toilet. It was a mix between the dinner he’d had earlier that night and more of that disgusting black bile. Ryan felt empty in more ways than one, his body a shell of what it should be. It hurt to even stand back up from the floor.

He wrapped a towel around his waist and turned the shower off. The mirror was too fogged up for him to see his reflection again, for which he was thankful; he wasn’t sure he could take the sight for a second time. He didn’t even think about what he wanted to pack when he got into the bedroom, just flung things onto the bed from the closet and drawers. An intern from the Archives had long ago been sent to his old apartment to grab a bunch of his clothing and possessions, and ever since he’d started sharing a bed with Gavin, Ryan’s stuff had been stored alongside the Brit’s.

It didn’t take long to get his things stuffed into a duffle bag – he didn’t have much in the first place – and he quickly packed away his laptop and work material in his backpack. As a last thought, he grabbed Gavin’s favorite hoodie and tucked that away too, not quite sure if he was doing it for himself or the other man. With all that out of the way, Ryan turned all of the lights off, exited the flat, and locked the door behind him. His legs were sluggish as he forced himself down the stairs; that apartment had been the first chunk of normalcy he’d had in years and he didn’t want to leave. But he also knew that leaving was the only way to keep people safe, including himself.

Jeremy was waiting in the car next to the curb when Ryan came out of the building. Ryan stored his things in the back and then buckled himself into the front passenger seat. Neither of them said a thing as they drove away.

The ride wasn’t very long and Ryan spent the entirety of it staring blankly out of the window. He only perked up when the Institute’s impressive facade came into view; it was exactly like the picture from the article Ryan had seen months ago when he’d first looked into it, impressive columns and classic architecture and all. Jeremy parked in a multi-story garage next door and directed Ryan to follow him to the front doors. The city was quiet, the extremely late hour spreading a peace throughout its streets that didn’t match the war going on inside Ryan’s head.

With a swipe of his key card, Jeremy let them into the building and headed to the elevators. Ryan walked slowly, his eyes taking in the massive arched ceilings and the intricately tiled marble floors – it was a beautiful building, one that he would have loved to see under much different circumstances.

“Come on, Geoff wants to meet you,” Jeremy said from in front of an open elevator.

Ryan stepped in and watched as the other man scanned his card again and pressed a button for a sub-level, of which there were five. He felt a chill in his bones as they descended – there was a power here that only seemed to get stronger the lower they went, one that felt ancient yet familiar. It didn’t feel bad but Ryan had learned the hard way that any new feeling like that wasn’t always a good thing. He frowned as the feeling increased.

“It’s the artifacts,” Jeremy stated from the other side of the elevator, his eyes staring passively at him.

“What?”

The younger man shrugged. “I made the same face my first time down here. It’s all the artifacts down in storage, the stuff connected to the entities. It can sometimes get a bit stuffy? Like, in your chest? But you get used to it.”

While that wasn’t necessarily a perfect explanation, Ryan felt a little better with the knowledge that it wasn’t just him that felt this way.

When the elevator door opened, the two of them were greeted by a short hallway that opened into a small lobby of sorts, some sort of reception desk stationed next to a closed door and two branching hallways off to the right and left. Jeremy led the way to the first door and knocked. A muffled voice replied to come in and Jeremy did just that.

The man inside the room was tall and thin, with dark hair and tired eyes, extensive tattoos spreading down his arms from under rolled sleeves. He looked up from where he was examining a whiteboard covered in notes and attached photos, a neutral expression on his face.

“You must be Ryan,” he said, sticking out his hand; Ryan hesitated for a moment before reaching out and shaking it. “I’m Dr. Ramsey, though I suppose you can call me Geoff – nobody else in this damn place respects my authority. Welcome to the Archives.”

Ryan knew about Geoff – Gavin had mentioned him several times, describing him as a mentor and close friend. “I’m sorry.”

“While I appreciate the sentiment, your apology isn’t needed.” At Ryan’s incredulous stare, Geoff continued with an exasperated sigh. “Honestly, it’s my fault for not pressing harder to have you housed here instead of letting Gavin convince me that you’d be fine at his place. Now I’ve got to deal with that idiot being in a coma for who knows how long _in addition_ to trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with you.”

A stab of anxiety hit Ryan. “Gavin’s in a _coma??_ ”

Geoff sat down at his desk and looked up at him with an austere expression. “The kid pushed himself way further than he’s ever done. We don’t know the extent of his powers but clearly he’s not meant to use them _that_ much. Doc’s confident he’ll wake up eventually though.”

“Where is he?” Ryan asked in a choked voice.

“Down a level; we’ve got him hooked up to fluids in our medical station for now, and our resident health specialist Alfredo is keeping him closely monitored. If things get worse, we’ll take him back to the hospital, but those guys don’t know anything about the Abominations so they’re not going to be much help to someone in what’s essentially a fucking magical sleep.”

Jeremy chuckled darkly. “Think a kiss’ll wake the bastard up?”

“Not unless that kiss is actually a syringe full of pure adrenaline, and even then I think that might actually just kill him.”

Ryan’s gut was squirming. “When can – will I be able to see him?”

The head of the Archives stared long and hard at him as if he could see right into Ryan’s soul. “Maybe in a couple days. I want to run a full set of tests on you first, see what you’ve got going on in there if we can. I’m not letting you near him if we have even the smallest inkling that you’ll freak out again.” He swiped his hands down his face. “Wouldn’t be a bad thing if we could get your eyes back to normal either – no offense but they’re creepy as hell.”

“Ok,” Ryan whispered. At least he was going to be allowed to see Gavin at some point; he’d been worried that they would lock him away and keep him there. “What should I do for now? Where will I be kept?”

Geoff tilted his head to the side. “Kept? You’re not an animal, Ryan; we’re not keeping you _imprisoned_ , you’re just here for safety purposes, yours as well as other’s. We won’t lock you up unless you go crazy again and I’m really hoping that’s not going to happen. You’ll be _staying_ in the rest quarters down the hall – it’s where our agents sleep when they’re on long shifts or don’t want to go home. Gavin basically lived there before you started staying with him.”

And didn’t that sound better than some sort of dark cell with nothing but his own mind to keep him company? He’d be able to exist as a human, even if he didn’t feel like one.

“Will I be allowed to help in the, uh, investigation at all?”

“I’d sure fucking hope you would,” Jeremy declared from his side. “You’re our best resource besides that stupid book and I for one don’t really want to read another word in Gaelic ever again.”

Ryan felt his brow crease. “What about Michael? He made it pretty clear that he hates me.”

“He’ll come around,” Geoff assured him. “He’s Gavin’s best friend and he’s just really freaked out right now. But he isn’t stupid – he knows you don’t want to hurt Gav, and he knows you’ll be as helpful as you can be. And if he causes any trouble, I’ll pull him off the case till he calms down. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

He’d probably never be fully comfortable in this place but Ryan at least felt safer; the people here were experts in their field and Geoff exuded a quiet confidence that was enviable, a controlled strength hidden behind a relaxed face. If anybody could keep Ryan from being taken over again besides Gavin, it was this man in front of him.

“Ok,” he conceded. “When do we start?”

Geoff gave him a stern look, almost paternal in its execution. “You’re not doing anything till you get some sleep – you look dead on your feet.” He stood up again and grabbed the coat laying over the back of his chair. “We _all_ need some sleep after everything that’s happened tonight.”

Ryan couldn’t agree more.

“I’ll take you to your room,” Jeremy said as he walked out of the office, Ryan dutifully following.

Behind them, Geoff shut and locked the door. “I’ll see ya’ll tomorrow. First thing in the morning, you and I are going to have a talk, Ryan.”

Nodding, Ryan continued to follow Jeremy down the hall. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, well, just don’t make me regret it,” came the mumbled reply.

About six doorways down, Jeremy opened up a small room and flicked on the light switches. Inside, there were two sets of bunk beds with double beds on bottom and singles on top, a small set of drawers, and a hamper. All of the beds were made up with sheets and a blanket but one of them also had a warm looking comforter on top. Ryan suspected this was where Gavin used to sleep when he stayed predominantly at the Archives instead of his apartment. It wasn’t much but it was better than Ryan felt he merited.

Setting his duffle bag and backpack down against the wall opposite the beds, Ryan turned to Jeremy. “I guess I’ll, uh, see you in the morning?”

The other man shrugged. “Bathrooms are down the hall to your left, first door you pass. If you need anything, or you start feeling, I dunno, _funny_ , call Gav’s phone – either Michael or I will have it.”

“Ok,” Ryan replied quietly as he stared blankly into the room. “Thank you, Jeremy.” He had a feeling he would be doing a lot of thanking.

Jeremy started to close the door but stopped to look back at Ryan, curiously earnest. “Seriously Ryan, call us – for whatever. Gav wouldn’t want you to lock yourself away.” He waited for a few seconds, mouth slightly open like he was going to say something else, before collecting himself and leaving the door clicking shut behind him.

As soon as he was alone, Ryan let his shoulders slump and the building wave of exhaustion wash over him. His head ached something awful and he could barely keep his eyes open. Who knew that going through some sort of crazy eldritch transformation ritual would be so taxing on a body?

He didn’t bother changing into pajamas before slipping into the bed with the comforter, only removing his shoes and jeans, his jacket flung on the other bed. While the mattress wasn’t the most comfortable, the blankets were soft and there was plenty of space for his large frame. The sheets still smelled faintly of Gavin even though he likely hadn’t even stepped foot in this room since he picked Ryan up. It was comforting, in a familiar way, but he was still alone; it was just him, his crushing guilt, and the shadows in the corners of the room.

He left the lights on.

……..

Gavin woke up slowly.

The first thing he noticed was how low the lighting was, like whatever room he was in had all but a single muted light on, just the barest hint of it filtering through his closed eyelids. The second thing he noticed was that his body felt like it was made from lead; when he tried to lift a single finger, it took a herculean effort to get it to move even a little. The third thing, which was probably the most comforting, was the sound of well-known murmured voices coming from somewhere nearby.

- _still can’t believe they haven’t found anything-_

_-interns said there wasn’t even a drop of blood to mop up-_

_-no evidence that it happened at all-_

_-went back and checked myself-_

Confused, he tried to say something but all that came out of his mouth was a tight gurgle, his throat not quite up to making any other sound. It was enough to call attention to him though, causing the two people in the room with him to stop talking and move to his side.

“Gav?” That was definitely Michael.

Once more, Gavin tried to say something; he managed to croak out a small groan.

“You awake there, buddy?” Jeremy was here too.

This time, instead of trying to speak, Gavin put all his energy into forcing his eyes open. It took him a few long seconds but he got there eventually, the soft light in the room still stinging a bit. He looked to his left and sure enough, both Jeremy and Michael stood there with matching looks of relief on their faces. It took even more energy to turn his head towards them but Gavin could feel his body gradually getting back to normal a he lay there. He blinked lethargically at his friends.

“Hey there,” Michael whispered, a smile beginning to form. “It’s good to have you back.”

Gavin concentrated on putting a small grin on his own face; it ended up being just a slight uptick to the corner of his mouth but he figured it got the point across, if the same expression on Jeremy’s face was anything to go by.

“You’ve been out for a week,” Michael informed him. “Had us scared there for a bit.”

Gavin succeeded in getting out a barely there hum in reply.

Jeremy turned to Michael. “I’m gonna go get Fredo and Geoff, they’ll want to check in on him.”

“Rr-” Gavin could only get the very beginning of Ryan’s name out but judging by the way Michael’s brows pulled together, he knew exactly what he was trying to say.

“He’s not allowed in here yet,” he stated a little harshly. “We’re still running stress tests an-”

Gavin managed to interrupt him with a particularly strong _hmm_ ; Michael only looked the slightest bit sheepish.

Apparently, Jeremy hadn’t quite left the room yet because he spoke up to support Gavin. “I’ll try and see if Geoff’ll let him come down too. I know he’s been real antsy since, uh, you know...” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, yeah, I’ll be right back.”

The sound of a door shutting was the last noise Gavin heard before several long seconds of silence, disturbed only by the light beeping of a heart monitor. Gavin started to feel all of his nerves wake up, his arms and legs tingling just on this side of painful. He could intimately feel where an IV was inserted in the crook of his elbow – he’d never been fond of needles – and the gentle pinch of the little device on one of his fingers that tracked his pulse. Even the prickling in his eyes caused by the dim lighting was beginning to fade. He swallowed and tried to speak once more.

“’m s’ry.” His throat felt like sandpaper.

Michael sighed and reached out to hold one of Gavin’s hands, expression softening. “I’m not mad at you, Gav. You just – I was worried; you keep getting yourself into these kinds of messes even though you say you’re being careful.” He gently squeezed his hand. “I know you care about Ryan – and I know he didn’t mean to do what he did – I just can’t help but be, I dunno, _scared_ of him, you know?”

And Gavin did know – what Ryan had done, what he had become, was terrifying, there was no denying that. But what could they have done to prevent it? What could they have possibly done to prepare for such an unimaginable disaster? He’d done his best to figure out what the Throne wanted and yet he hadn’t been able to protect the one person he’d promised he would. He was the real failure in this situation.

“Jeremy’s right though,” Michael continued. “He’s been a mess while you’ve been out. Geoff’s got him running through some tests and stuff but mostly he’s just been moping in his room, beating himself up over what happened.” He grunted quietly and looked away ashamedly. “I probably haven’t been helping much with that – haven’t been the nicest to him.”

Gavin knew everything Michael did was out of loyalty and that Ryan would understand that too. He had high hopes that the two of them would get along quite well, actually, if only all of this creepy stuff would stop happening. At least now they would have him as a buffer to ease into it.

“’s ok,” he mumbled. It was getting easier and easier to speak as time went on, as if his body was finally waking up. “Geoff?”

Michael snorted. “Oh, you know him; he’s pissed. But he was even worse off than Ryan, in his own way. You’re gonna get an earful when he gets down here. Don’t expect to be off the hook for a while.”

There was a familiar feeling of comfort in Gavin chest; Geoff had always been protective of him, had always cared deeply about his safety, especially after the incident with the Maze stone. The older man’s anger was justified, sure, but he would forgive Gavin as he always had. It was a relief to know that.

A few more minutes passed in silence, Michael holding a cup of water with a straw so Gavin could take a couple sips. The cool liquid soothed his raw throat and made him feel a little more lucid. He was able to move a little more too, the tingling mostly gone, and Michael helped him so he could put pillows behind his back and stay sitting propped up. Fatigue still permeated his bones but at least he could keep his eyes open and have coherent thoughts, some of which were questions like _where are my clothes_ and _where did they get a hospital gown_. At least they’d left his briefs on.

Eventually, a knock interrupted the calm and several people entered the room, the first among them a very furious-looking Geoff.

“You bull-headed, overly-selfless, absolute fucking _idiot_ ,” he growled out. Despite his anger though, he immediately walked over and gathered Gavin tightly in his arms. “I swear to god I’ll kill you myself if you _ever_ do something like that again.”

Gavin struggled a little but was able to loosely wrap his arms around the other man. “Good t’ see you too.”

Geoff pulled back and stared at him, hands on Gavin’s shoulders. “You’re lucky I love you, kid.”

“I know,” Gavin responded with as much of a smile as he could muster.

From behind Geoff, Alfredo moved to stand next to the bed, a small pen light held in his hand. “Not that I don’t like seeing a good heartfelt reunion but I need to actually make sure everything’s hunky-doory.” He smiled at Gavin as Geoff pulled away. “How do you feel, Gav?”

“Like I got hit by a truck.” Gavin was glad that his voice was coming out clearer now and he was able to speak in complete sentences.

Alfredo huffed out a laugh and held the light up to examine Gavin’s eyes; it only hurt a little. “Yeah, well, giving somebody your literal life force will do that to you.” He picked up Gavin’s wrist and felt his pulse. Apparently satisfied, he stood back again. “Feel anything else besides tired?”

Gavin shrugged. “Bit of a headache but nothing too bad. Could probably eat a horse though.”

“There’s some crackers on the table,” Alfredo said with a grin. “See if you can keep those down and we’ll go from there.”

There was a moment where nobody moved. Then, like something straight out of a cheesy rom-com, Jeremy clapped his hands together softly.

“I don’t know about you guys but, uh, I could really go for a cup of coffee right now.”

Alfredo startled a little, gave Gavin one last glance, and started towards the door. “Uh, yeah, coffee sounds nice.”

With a smirk, Geoff turned and followed. Michael stayed behind briefly, looking conflicted as he stared back at Gavin. He placed a cell phone on the table next to the bed.

“If anything happens, call one of us immediately.”

Confusion ran through Gavin. “What do you mean? What could possibly happen?”

Michael pursed his lips and he turned away to leave. “Just – call if you need anything.”

Gavin’s confusion lasted all but ten seconds while he watched his friends close the door behind themselves. Then, stepping into view from behind the little crowd of people around the bed, Ryan moved to stand next to him; he stood hunched into himself, one arm crossed over his chest to hold the other, and his closed off face betrayed how obviously he was hurting. It felt wrong to see him like that.

“Hey there,” Gavin greeted, trying for a confident tone but only managing to sound tired. “I’m glad to see you’re alright.”

The other man didn’t look up, just seemed to deflate even more. “I-” He didn’t finish his sentence.

Now, that just wouldn’t do. “Ryan, look at me.”

“I – I don’t want to scare you.”

“You’ve never scared me, Ryan. I’ve only ever been scared _for_ you.” Gavin was beginning to worry that whatever the two of them had built up before everything went to shit was now gone. “Please, let me see you so I can make sure you’re really ok.”

Slowly, like it was physically painful to move, Ryan lifted his face. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting but Gavin was relieved to see that nothing much had changed about the older man except for the deepening of the dark circles under his eyes. That, and those eyes themselves.

“Come here,” Gavin said while stretching his hand out towards him.

Ryan reluctantly shuffled nearer and sat in the chair Michael had previously occupied. He leaned closer when Gavin beckoned him with his fingers, flinching when that hand was placed on his cheek. He refused to fully meet Gavin’s gaze.

“They’re hideous, I know,” Ryan rasped.

But Gavin couldn’t disagree more – they were the most strangely captivating things he’d ever seen; where before they had been a muted blue-gray, now there were pitch black sclera surrounding irises the color of shattered glass, the pupils dilated to intake as much light as they could in the dim room. Gavin softly stroked his thumb just under the corner of one eye, Ryan’s long lashes fluttering at the touch.

“They’re _beautiful_...” Gavin whispered reverently.

At this, Ryan finally looked straight at him, countless questions burning in his stare. “How can you say that, after – after everything that I did?”

“That wasn’t you,” Gavin assured, his other hand coming up to frame Ryan’s face. “You shouldn’t keep blaming yourself for it all – I sure don’t.” He sighed, regret filling his words. “It was me who should be blamed; I couldn’t prevent you from being Overtaken.”

Ryan shook his head. “You did your best.”

“And it wasn’t good enough.” His arms were getting heavy so he pulled them back to his chest. “But I promise that I will be better.”

The room felt tense for a long minute, Ryan looking down at something in his lap while Gavin watched. Eventually, Ryan raised his head again and held out a folded up article of soft-looking material.

“Here,” he said. “I brought this from your apartment.”

Gavin took it and unfolded it, reveling that it was his favorite hoodie; he smiled widely. “Thank you, I appreciate that you thought to grab this.” He held it to his face, pleasantly surprised to find that it smelled strongly of the soap Ryan always used in the shower – the larger man wouldn’t have been able to fit into it, so he must have spent a lot of time just holding it. With a knowing smirk, Gavin sat up a little more, leaning away from the pillows. “Help me put it on? I’m already tired of this damn robe.”

The distinct flush of embarrassment made its home on Ryan’s cheeks but he still moved to comply, standing again to help steady Gavin and pull the hospital gown off. It was an easy task but before they could begin slipping the hoodie over Gavin’s head, Ryan froze. For a moment, the Brit was confused; what could the other man have seen? But then it hit him.

“Don’t worry about those,” Gavin said reassuringly, referencing the elaborate cross-hatching of scars that littered his back from his shoulders down, dipping into the top of his underwear. “Got them when I was younger, way before I started working at the Archives.”

Gently, his fingers barely touching skin, Ryan began to trace each scar. He didn’t say anything, just moved methodically downward, sending shivers through Gavin’s whole body. No one had every touched him like that – no one had ever really seen those particular scars at all, except Geoff and Michael. They weren’t anything special, just another part of who he was, but Gavin tended to keep them to himself anyway.

“My mistake with the stone that gave me my powers wasn’t my first encounter with the Maze,” he began, Ryan’s eyes flicking up to him briefly before returning to their meticulous cataloging of scars. “When I was about eleven or twelve, I got lost in the woods behind our house. I’d been playing in there my whole life but that day happened to be incredibly foggy – I got too far in and then couldn’t find my way out again. I spent hours and hours in there wandering blindly. To this day, I have no idea what attacked me but it honestly felt like it was the mist itself. Realized that it was the Maze that’d got me lost once I started working here.”

Ryan took his hand away before he got too low. “And what about the stone?”

Gavin smiled and sat up a little straighter. He reached out to grab Ryan’s hand, pressing into the large, star-burst shaped scar that sat just over the base of his sternum. The other man’s skin was warm and it sent a feeling of contentment through Gavin’s chest.

“This one’s much cooler,” he said with a grin.

There was the slightest tilt to Ryan’s lips as he stared down at where his hand lay. “If you say so.”

Gavin couldn’t help but laugh a little. “I do say so.” He held out the hoodie. “Now, if we could please get back to the task at hand – I’m getting quite cold.”

It was Ryan’s turn to huff out a tiny chuckle. “Always so demanding.”

“I think I deserve it.”

Ryan’s face fell again. “I’m sor-”

“Oh, stuff it,” Gavin admonished, kicking himself for even letting Ryan’s head go in that direction. “I’m fine, Ryan, really, and I won’t have you staying in this, this _mood_ for the rest of the day.” He didn’t stop talking while Ryan helped him pull the hoodie over his head and stick his arms through the sleeves. “Nothing is gained by either of us wallowing in our own guilt, so let’s just move past it all and work on fixing things, alright?”

There was an unidentifiable emotion on Ryan’s face as he looked back at him, hands still gripping the well-loved fabric at the hem of the hoodie. “Alright.”

All of that moving had really tired Gavin out and it was getting harder to hold his eyelids open. “I think it’s time for another nap, anyway.”

Ryan nodded and started to walk away but Gavin managed to snag his hand before he could, causing the other man to look down at him with wide eyes.

“And just where do you think you’re going?” Gavin demanded.

“I, uh, figured you’d want some peace and quiet.”

With a snort, Gavin tugged on Ryan’s hand. “Right, and I can’t have that with you here too?” His face turned serious. “Stay; I’m not really keen on being alone right now.”

Ryan hesitated. “Shouldn’t I go get the others?”

“No, I’d like it if it was just the two of us, please. Besides, you look like you could use a nap as well.” When Ryan still wavered, Gavin shoved himself over to make room on the bed, lifting up the blanket. “Come on, at least provide me with some body warmth – we both know you’re like a human furnace.”

Another twitch of Ryan’s lips and he was finally climbing into the bed. He settled himself next to Gavin but he held himself so rigidly and that just wouldn’t cut it. Going for at least a semblance of nonchalant, Gavin wiggled close into Ryan’s warmth, laying on his side so he could drape an arm over the larger man’s chest. He heaved a great sigh and nuzzled his cheek into the fabric of Ryan’s shirt, one eye still keeping watch over the room.

Carefully, Ryan pulled the blanket back over the two of them. It took a few minutes but eventually Gavin could tell that the pull of sleep wasn’t only affecting himself; Ryan was slowly relaxing, his breathing evening out. After several more minutes, he even allowed himself to curl his own arm around Gavin. Sleep was soon to follow for them both.

Gavin didn’t mention how the shadows in the corner seemed to move as he drifted off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm [toasterness](http://toasterness.tumblr.com) on Tumblr if you wanna be Freewood trash with me <3


	11. Thicker Than Water

If Ryan was being perfectly honest with himself, he would admit that he probably had feelings for Gavin. Raw, impossibly strong feelings. Being around him felt safe, the simplest of touches a warm embrace. It wasn’t like it was hard to like Gavin; on the contrary, it was almost too easy to like him. Which was probably why Ryan was so frustrated.

He had settled into the Archives after Geoff had moved him in and now that Gavin was well again, the two of them went back to sharing a bed. The small room where they slept was just big enough to fit all of their combined things but it was as much of a home as anywhere else Ryan had lived. It was intimate and warm, something he looked forward to at the end of the day.

They didn’t talk about the kiss. Ryan wanted to – oh, how he wanted to – but he could never seem to build up the courage. Things were good now that Gavin was awake again and they lived together inside the Archives, and Ryan didn’t want to change that. And what if their kiss from their fight with the Throne didn’t mean the same thing to Gavin as it did to him? What if it had only ever been just a way to snap him out of his monstrous rage? Ryan wasn’t sure he could handle that kind of truth.

It wasn’t like he thought Gavin didn’t like him though – it was clear he did by the way he acted around Ryan, and how he still slipped under the covers of their shared bed every night. There was an implicit trust in that, in how Gavin never acted like he thought Ryan would change again. The whole of the Archives felt suffocating at times and the simple fact that he had a safe place to go at the end of every day left a contentment in Ryan’s soul. Every nightmare, every sleepless night, Gavin was there to comfort him.

There were a lot of those now, nights where Ryan lay awake for hours, unable to sleep no matter how tired he was. He would stay curled into Gavin’s warm body and try to keep his eyes closed but sleep just wouldn’t come. This wasn’t always a bad thing really, as his nightmares had come back full force – he rarely had a night without them. Even Gavin’s presence couldn’t fight them off.

Some mornings, after particularly bad dreams, Ryan would wake up suddenly and have to bolt to the bathroom to empty the contents of his stomach. It was always the same; sickly black bile tinged with blood. Gavin would follow him and rub his back soothingly while he retched, whispering softly in that lilting accent. The more time went on, the more frequently it happened. Ryan was clearly getting worse but no one could figure out how to help him other than provide support and hope that he could last until they could end things with the Throne and their plans.

And so the two of them continued to go about their business as usual as best they could, going back to their routine from before, Gavin splitting his time between his office and the lab and Ryan working from his laptop in one of the smaller conference rooms. One small but very enjoyable change was that they were able to interact throughout the day and even eat lunch together, something they had actually never done except on the rare weekends that Gavin stayed home. Sometimes other Archive staff ate with them as well.

Ryan finally got to know the people who were trying to protect him – Trevor, who worked down in artifact storage and was a walking, talking encyclopedia; Jack, Geoff’s right hand man, who’s laugh could make anybody smile; Matt, a delightfully dry comedian and brilliant researcher. He discovered that Jeremy was a cat enthusiast (fully encouraged by a one Lindsay Jones) and eventually even made peace with Michael, whose stubborn streak finally ended when Gavin forced him to sit down at their table and actually _talk_ to Ryan. As it turned out, the two of them had a lot in common and what started as an uneasy truce quickly became a true friendship.

All of it was more than Ryan was used to and more than he thought he deserved; he had never had this many friends at one time, and certainly none that actually seemed to care for him. Strange, yes, but more welcome than he could ever express. He hadn’t noticed how starved he was for human interaction – true, positive human interaction – so finally experiencing it was almost overwhelming at first. But after several weeks of living in the Archives, he accepted that maybe he did deserve some kindness in his life.

One evening, a month and a half after the incident at the docks, Ryan was making dinner in the tiny kitchenette down the hall from the main offices when a particularly tired looking Gavin walked in. His hair was mussed and he had creases imprinted on his left cheek; it looked like he’d just woken up from another nap at his desk. Ryan was used to seeing the other man in such a state – Gavin rarely got enough sleep either and had a habit of taking impromptu naps at his desk – but he for sure wasn’t accustomed to seeing the younger man exactly like this.

“Is that my hoodie?”

Gavin looked down at himself; his whole body was completely swimming in a dark gray sweatshirt with the name of Ryan’s old college faded on the front, his fingers barely poking out from the sleeves.

“No.”

A silly little feeling settled next to Ryan’s heart. “Ah, I see, my bad.”

“You must have it confused with another,” Gavin said with a massive yawn as he shuffled over to the counter to stand next to Ryan.

“Of course.”

Ok, so he _definitely_ had feelings for Gavin.

……..

Gavin knew he was good at his job.

He was the youngest head archivist at the Omnium Vanitatum and had a successful track record of completed cases that rivaled even Geoff’s. His reputation as a competent researcher meant that he was considered a trusted source of information, and he was always willing to pick up extra work to help out around the Institute. He was confident and loyal, qualities that were greatly appreciated in his line of work.

What he wasn’t good at was dealing with anything connected with romantic feelings; in all of his life, Gavin had been absolute shit at letting people in or expressing anything beyond platonic love. Sure, he’d _felt_ things for other people but he’d never actually been able to tell them that. When it came to dealing with even the simplest of crushes, Gavin was useless and he knew it.

Which was why he was so certain that he was going to mess up whatever he had with Ryan, so sure that he’d ruin their easy closeness and gentle friendship. He didn’t want to stop sleeping in the same bed, or calming Ryan down from a nightmare, or even just the simple act of sitting with their thighs pressed together while they ate lunch. It terrified him how strongly he felt for the other man and Gavin couldn’t figure out how to deal with it all. Tack on the horror story that was their life right now and Gavin was sure that everything was one misstep away from falling apart.

But despite all of that, Gavin couldn’t help but let slip small displays of affection, little things that he hoped Ryan wouldn’t reject. It started with spending more and more time with him, then progressed to things like tracking down his favorite foods and bringing them back to the Archives specifically to see the genuinely surprised and happy face that Ryan would respond with. Gavin even spent three days caring for him when he fell ill with the flu, bundling him up in blankets, feeding him soup, and wiping the sweat off his brow with a cool, wet cloth. And at night, when Ryan had his nightmares, Gavin would hold him tighter than usual and whisper calming words in his ear, just like before, and soothe him when he vomited more of that disgusting ichor. Now though, he sometimes let himself press soft kisses to the other man’s temple.

Over time, he realized that Ryan was doing similar things, like bringing him tea when he’d been stuck in his office all day, or joining him in the lab to keep him company when Matt was gone. Every single time, without fail, Gavin felt intensely warm all over and knew, without a doubt, that he was totally fucked.

Like he had been doing more and more lately, Ryan was currently fast asleep in Gavin’s spare office chair, head leaning back against the wall with his mouth hanging slightly open. The mere sight set butterflies loose in Gavin’s belly. It was, quite honestly, very distracting.

Over the past weeks, Gavin – and the rest of the team, especially Matt – had been making excellent progress with the _Ath-thogail an Saoghal_ ; they’d managed to clean up almost the whole book, transcribing and translating page after page of information. Most of it wasn’t all too helpful in their search for when or where the Throne would strike again but they were definitely learning a massive amount of information about the cult in general. So, not a total bust.

Part of what they’d uncovered was that Ryan was part of a decades-long plot to create the perfect Vessel, the ideal channel through which Ichthis would enact its terrible plans. The book spoke of a failed attempt over a hundred years previously with distant relatives that involved using the wrong twin: by the time they’d realized their failure, the Throne had already eliminated the other child, effectively ruining their shot. Ryan’s extensive lineage spanned over two centuries and was filled with elaborate rituals and selective breeding within the cult in an attempt to rectify their prior mistake, all documented in detail within the text. Unfortunately, as the cultists had told Ryan when they attacked him in his home, his parents had defected and tried to hide him among the normal population. But Ryan had already been Marked – he would never truly be able to escape.

Understandably, Ryan hadn’t taken that information well; Gavin had tried to break it to him easily but was there really a good way to tell someone that ‘hey, you’re the spawn of insane cultists and your destiny is to be taken over by a terrifying Eldritch monster’? Not likely. So he had done his best to comfort the older man, however he could.

Which led him to now, sitting at his desk at 1:00 am, staring at Ryan’s sleeping figure instead of doing actual work. Gavin knew that he was being a bit selfish by not waking him up and sending him to bed, he knew that Ryan needed sleep, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so; when he was like this, Gavin could look as long as he wanted without risk of being caught.

“You’re staring again,” Ryan mumbled.

 _Shit_. Maybe he wasn’t as asleep as previously thought.

“Sorry,” Gavin said, his cheeks warming as he quickly looked back down at the papers he was supposed to be examining. “Got a bit, er, spaced out.”

Ryan huffed out an amused chuckle, slowly stretching and standing up. He opened his mouth in a huge yawn and then walked behind the desk. Gavin couldn’t help but stare as Ryan’s shirt rode up just enough to reveal a thin sliver of pale skin.

“That means it’s time for bed,” Ryan quietly rasped. He reached out and set his hand on Gavin’s upper arm. “I’m not going back into our room by myself, so you’re either going to make me sit back down in that chair or you’re coming with me.”

 _Our_ room. Not _my_ room – _our room_. “Right, yeah, I suppose I’ve been at it for long enough.” Ryan’s answering smile was worth halting any progress Gavin had been making.

Not bothering to organize the papers on his desk before he got out of his chair, Gavin followed Ryan out of the office, turning the lights off behind them. The walk down the hallway to their room ( _their_ room!) took only about twenty seconds but Gavin used it all to gather his bearings; he needed to say something tonight, wanted to change things between them for the better before everything unavoidably went to shit. Who was he kidding? He had it bad. And something was telling him that Ryan did too.

There was only one way to find out.

“I got an email today from my boss that said I was being considered for a raise,” Ryan interrupted his thoughts as they entered their room.

 _Guess I’ll have to try a little later_. “Oh? That’s great!”

“Yeah,” the other man said with a large grin. “About time too.”

Gavin watched as Ryan started to get changed for bed, carelessly letting his eyes wander over the taller man’s form. “Mhmm.”

Lifting his shirt over his head, Ryan continued. “Kinda seems a little, I dunno, unimportant though?” He stripped down into his boxer briefs before pulling on a worn pair of sweatpants. “Compared to everything else going on in my life right now, that is.”

“I think you deserve good things to happen to you,” Gavin confessed as he too began to change. At what point had they become so comfortable around each other that all modesty had escaped them? “God knows you’ve got enough on your plate as it is – a little positivity is healthy, you know.”

Ryan chuckled, crawling under the covers of their small bed and sliding over against the wall to make room, his words dripping with sarcasm. “Wow, thanks, I never would have known.”

Now wearing just his underwear and a t-shirt that dwarfed his skinny frame – no, he absolutely had _not_ stolen it from Ryan’s bag last week – Gavin turned off one of the room’s lights and slipped under the blankets, leaving the bed in slight shadow but the corners of the room still illuminated. Immediately, like they had every night since Ryan moved into the Archives, the two of them tucked themselves close to each other, legs habitually slotting together. Early on, Gavin had noticed that sleeping that close seemed to sap a little more energy out of him every night, leaving him more tired than normal in the morning, but every second of contact was worth it.

Tonight Gavin let Ryan wrap him up from behind, the other man’s bare chest a searing warmth across his back and their hands intertwined. They had abandoned any pretense of personal space while sharing a bed weeks ago, not bothering to even pretend that they wouldn’t end up tangled together in the morning anyway. This new normal was Gavin’s favorite thing, no matter the weird ache in his chest when they had to separate.

“Seriously Ryan, I’m happy for you – you’ve certainly earned it.”

Ryan’s laugh sent puffs of breath across the nape of Gavin’s neck, sending a shiver down his spine. “Thanks Gavin.”

They lay there silently for several long minutes, Ryan’s body heat seeping into Gavin’s very bones. This was it, the perfect opportunity to confess, presented on a silver platter, but he couldn’t get it out – his brain wouldn’t form the words, no matter how much he wanted to speak. He could feel Ryan’s heartbeat and it only made him want to say something even more; he wouldn’t hold Gavin this close and this intimately every night if he didn’t feel something too. Would he?

What would Gavin say though? That against his better judgment he’d fallen for the main subject of a work case, breaking multiple different rules in the Institute’s code of conduct? That despite the seemingly short amount of time they’d known each other, and the extremely unique nature of their situation, he still craved the other man’s affections? There was the distinct possibility that Ryan would reject emotions that strong. Gavin didn’t think he’d be cruel about it but the fear was still present while he debated what to say.

But Ryan, ever the surprise, interrupted his thoughts with a question so outlandish that Gavin’s heart all but stopped.

“Why is it that you care so much,” Ryan breathed, only audible because his mouth was right next to Gavin’s ear. “About me?”

Gavin froze, so taken aback that he couldn’t speak.

Ryan quickly backpedaled. “I mean, I get that I’m part of your case and it’s your job-”

“Because I just do,” Gavin cut him off. “Admittedly more than I’ve been expressing as of late.”

“But why? What do you mean?” Ryan’s sounded unsure, his voice unsteady.

Steeling himself, Gavin continued, pulling their intertwined hands away from his body so he could inspect them; Ryan had given him an out, the blessing of not having to maintain eye contact through all of this, and he wasn’t going to waste it. “I’m not...good at this kind of stuff – I’m terrible at talking about how I feel.” He slowly started to stroke his thumb across the back of Ryan’s hand. “You are incredibly important to me, Ryan, and I’m so grateful that you trust me like this.” With a shaky breath and a lump in his throat, Gavin continued. “I understand if you don’t – if that’s too much for you.”

Ryan leaned away from him, tugging on his arm like he wanted to get out of the bed and leave. Gavin’s heart barely had time to plummet into his belly before he was being turned to lay on his opposite side and face the other man. Ryan lay back down and put their hands together again to rest in between their chests. There was wonder in his strangely beautiful eyes, the evidence of the evil inside of him somehow a comfort rather than a reason to be scared.

“I didn’t think you felt the same way,” he confessed.

Butterflies erupted in Gavin’s stomach. “You – I – this is-” Nothing coherent would come out.

Laughter crinkled the corners of Ryan’s eyes. “Yeah, I like you too. A lot.”

“Oh.”

“Thank you for telling me.” Ryan’s face fell a small fraction. “But...are you sure? I don’t want to hurt you again.”

Gavin tightened his grip on Ryan’s hand. “I know what I’m getting into.”

“It’s just that I feel like, like we’re getting so close to figuring everything out but I still don’t know how to control myself. And-” He cleared his throat. “And we both know I’m getting worse; we can’t just ignore all the throwing up I do, or the increase in nightmares. Something is coming.”

There was a tightening in Gavin’s chest as he touched their foreheads together, reaching his free hand around to hold the back of Ryan’s head. “You’re scared.” It wasn’t a question.

Ryan’s words barely came out as a whisper. “Terrified.”

Gavin paused to take a long look into Ryan’s eyes, bright blue irises standing out among the black of his sclera; he felt powerless against the feeling that gaze gave to him. With a new sense of braveness, he tilted his head up to lay a chaste kiss against the space between Ryan’s eyes. The other man closed them and sighed, so Gavin kissed each eyelid too for good measure.

“I will keep you safe,” he promised. There was no telling if it would end up being broken like the last time but he needed to say it anyway, for both of them.

A shuddering exhale was Ryan’s only response.

“So,” Gavin began again after a few moments, mischief spurred on by Ryan’s reactions. “I’ve been thinking about that kiss.”

Ryan released a small laugh. “Me too.”

And it was like this was the breaking point, the dam finally bursting and letting out the flood of emotions held back by each of them. Gavin surged forward at the same time that Ryan did, their lips meeting in a long-awaited kiss, bodies pressing even closer together as it deepened. Gavin could feel the slight tug at the ball of light deep at his core, tendrils of power slowly but unwillingly transferring to Ryan through every point of contact but he couldn’t care less – this was exactly where he wanted to be and he wasn’t going to let some shitty entity take that away from him.

But then Ryan pulled back, out of breath and flushed, to smile fondly at him, oblivious to Gavin’s internal conflict. “Thank you.”

Despite the weariness now spread throughout his body, Gavin grinned back. And then he kissed Ryan again. And again. And again, till he was half asleep, his limbs weak and mind foggy. Ryan noticed eventually.

“I suppose we should actually sleep, huh?”

Gavin responded with a hum, resting his head fully back on his pillow.

“Goodnight, Gavin,” Ryan mumbled against his forehead in one final kiss.

The sound of Ryan’s steady breathing and the gentle hum of the overhead lights on the other side of the room lulled Gavin into a soft, dreamless sleep.

……..

“Let’s go over what we know again.”

Gavin stood in front of the large whiteboard in his lab, mad scribbling covering its surface in a multitude of colors and messy notes. Matt, Jeremy, Michael, and Ryan all sat around the room in varying stages of frustration, notebooks and printouts of _Ath-thogail an Saoghal_ pages scattered on top of every available flat surface. The five of them had been at it for three hours already, compiling all of their notes and working to figure out what the Throne’s next move would be. It was just shy of midnight and they all wanted to go home.

With a groan, Michael scrubbed his eyes with his palms. “We’ve been through this ten times already, Gav; what could we have possibly missed?”

“I don’t know!” Gavin was exhausted but he felt like they were teetering on the edge of something big, a turning point in their investigation. “But there has to be something!”

Jeremy stood up and began pacing. “Alright. So.” He rubbed the top of his bald head. “We know the Throne wants Ryan so he can be their freaky meat puppet – no offense, Rye-”

“None taken.”

“-and they can’t continue with the Reconstruction ritual without him. They need the Vessel because they’re trying to open a gate to let their horror god out and it needs somewhere to go. Their first try got thwarted – high five to us – so they’re bound to try again sooner rather than later.”

Matt nodded along. “We’ve got Ryan on lockdown, and we have ways of locating and maybe even shutting down any gates that open near us – you have the gloves and Trevor and I have been modifying some other equipment to detect fluctuations in different ranges of magnetics and light, which have proven in the past to be evidence of dimensional rifts.”

“And as long as we keep Ryan away from the Throne, things should be ok,” Jeremy concluded. “Sound about right?”

Gavin sighed. “Yeah, that about sums everything up.” He looked back at his board and practically growled. “We’ve got all these pages on _how_ the ritual works and we know where Ryan fits in, so why can’t we figure out their next move? We _have_ to be missing something – it’s the only explanation.”

“But Gav, none of the shit in that stupid book says anything about a when and where; it’s just a bunch of prep instructions and history of the cult,” Michael said from his perch on the workbench.

“I know, I know, I just feel like we’ve overlooked a key detail. Like, where’s their power coming from? How are they going to be able to open such a powerful gate?”

Throughout all of this, Ryan’s face was pulled taught in intense concentration as he stared down at a particular printout. On it was a simple diagram with numbers and archaic symbols intertwined in a web of intersecting lines.

“They need a conduit.”

Gavin paused, turning slowly to look at Ryan. “A what?”

“A conduit,” Ryan repeated. “Something for Ichthis’ power to easily flow through from his side of things to ours.” He stopped staring at the page and raised his head to meet Gavin’s eyes. “Remember how earlier in the _Ath-thogail an Saoghal_ it talks about how supposedly powerful the Prince of Slaughter is and how it will need a large enough opening between worlds to allow it to travel all at once?”

Understanding started to grow in Gavin’s mind. “Yes, I do recall that; Ichthis is a massive entity due to how much fear it has to feed on.”

Ryan continued, a glint of excitement in his gaze, and held up the diagram for the rest of them to see. “This is from the last chapter of the book – I’m not one hundred percent sure but if I’m correct in understanding it, then it’s describing how to make a, a battery-meets-surge-protector – something to allow a gradual transfer of energy. It’s a bunch of math, I think? But it reads like circuitry.”

“So you’re saying they could have some sort of fancy transfer station?” Michael asked, his interest piqued.

“No, nothing as put together as that,” Ryan explained while waving his hands around, the paper flapping. “According to this, it doesn’t have to be organized really at all, just a collection of interconnected points that anchor themselves together, positioned near the gate.”

Gavin was silent for a moment as he let that information filter through his thoughts. When he’d originally looked at the diagram in Ryan’s hand, he’d thought it was the main gateway, not something separate. Now that he thought about it though, it made perfect sense; with how much force the Throne would need to pull off a summoning like they planned, they’d either need a massive source of energy or the ability to do things over a longer period of time.

“Do you think maybe their first attempt with Ryan was them trying to do everything all at once and that was why it was easier to shut down?” Matt had leaned forward in his seat and was now holding the diagram, inspecting it closely.

Jeremy shook his head absentmindedly. “I dunno; it was almost too easy to locate the gate and shut it down with the chime,” he admitted. “With something as big as the Reconstruction, you’d think the Throne would put a little more effort into their plans.”

Michael grimaced. “I don’t think they were too concerned with the gate once Ryan went all, you know...”

“Crazy?” Supplied Ryan.

“You said it, not me.”

There was another long stretch of silence as the five of them considered all of the variables now that they had this new information from Ryan. Gavin still felt like they were still missing something, like the wool had been pulled over their eyes and the Throne was leading them into a trap. He was staring off into space, eyes unfocused on the work bench, when an image caught his attention from the corner of his vision.

It was a page from the middle of the _Ath-thogail an Saoghal,_ an illustration of the culmination of several preparatory phases. Depicted was a gruesome scene involving several human sacrifices, their blood collected in jars and their bodies burned to ash. The figure that they now knew as the Vessel was present as well, surrounded by shadows at the center of it all, a small black dot hovering over its head. While at first glance it appeared to illustrate the final ritual, realization was slowly dawning on Gavin that perhaps it wasn’t the true end after all; perhaps it too was another set-up.

 _‘The seed has already been planted’_ , that’s what the Throne had said all those weeks ago at the docks. Something else about a ‘true gate’ too. Gavin looked again at the little dot drawn above the Vessel; he’d written it off as a mistake when he’d first seen it, an accidental ink splatter during the picture’s creation. But now he saw it under a different light.

“That wasn’t meant to be their final attempt,” he said more to himself than anyone else. Glancing up at the others and their curious stares, he went on, working through his thoughts out loud. “I think – I think they were still preparing for the real thing.”

“How do you mean?” Ryan asked.

“Take a look at this.” Using the document camera on the table, Gavin projected the sacrifice drawing up on the wall. “The Throne said something about a seed being planted in Ryan – I think that’s what this mark is.” He pointed to the spot. “What if they were just using a smaller gate to draw enough energy to, to... _infect_ Ryan?”

At this statement, Ryan’s face went a little green. “They were still getting me ready.”

“Had to fit in the last piece,” Jeremy concluded, disgust written all over his face. “But what about all the blood they apparently need?”

Michael swore under his breath. “Remember how the interns we sent to clean up the mess came back and said there wasn’t anything there when they got to the docks?”

“Shit.” Jeremy looked at Michael with wide eyes. “More of the Throne must have come back and collected it somehow.”

The green color on Ryan’s cheeks deepened a little; he looked like he might throw up. “They used me. They, they knew I’d lose it and they used me to kill their own people and supply the needed sac – the sacrifices.”

Gavin felt sick to his stomach, rage filling him; the cultists had made Ryan a murderous pawn in their foul games. Ryan was a good man – he already felt horrible for slaughtering all those people, even if they were out to defile him, but to know that it had all been planned from the beginning, that he was basically born to kill and play a main part in bringing about the apocalypse? Gavin couldn’t imagine how he must be feeling.

Cautiously, Gavin moved over to Ryan and stood next to him, gently pressing into his side in comfort. He laced their fingers together without looking down, squeezing them in an attempt at grounding the other man. Ryan’s breathing slowly evened out and he appeared a little less nauseous. The others all pointedly looked away from their linked hands.

“They still need a conduit for the final ritual,” Gavin began, his thoughts a swirling mess inside his head. “So what’s it supposed to be?”

“Another human?” Michael suggested, though even he didn’t seem like he believed it.

Matt hummed. “I don’t think so; looking at this diagram makes me think that it’s a bunch of parts put together, like multiple capacitors and resistors on a circuit board. I bet you anything Marked would work pretty well.” He looked suddenly very thoughtful. “You’d probably need as many as you could get your hands on to produce the kind of system big enough to handle transferring an Abomination, and you’d have to keep them pretty close to where you want to open the gate to avoid energy loss over a long travel distance.”

A sinking feeling settled in Gavin’s gut. “I think I know where they’d get enough pieces.”

Michael stared at him like he was reading his mind. “Artifact storage.” Yeah, definitely reading his mind.

“What?” Ryan almost choked on his words. “You mean, like, the artifact storage that’s a floor below us? _That_ artifact storage??”

Gavin squeezed his hand again. “It’s the largest collection of items Marked by the Prince of Slaughter and his Crimson Throne.”

“And we’ve got it all neatly package up in the same space, stored all together and just waiting to be used by a monstrous entity from beyond this world.” Michael groaned and let his head drop into his hands.

A deep frown formed on Matt’s face. “That would suggest that they’ve been _letting_ us collect their artifacts.” His eyes widened a fraction. “That was their plan all along, wasn’t it – get us to gather a massive assortment of Throne-Marked items, stick them all into one place, and wait for the opportune moment to strike.”

“They created a fucking Trojan horse, piece by fucking piece.” There was a mix of awe and fury in Michael’s voice.

Matt continued. “They must have been working on this for decades!”

“At least a hundred years,” Gavin affirmed, thinking back to how long the Archives had existed and how far back the Throne’s preparations went. “Probably many more.”

Jeremy pulled out his phone. “I’m going to call Trevor.” Soon enough, the lead artifact storage agent was on speaker, clearly just having been woken up by the call. Jeremy quietly filled him in on what they’d uncovered.

Leaning further into Ryan, hoping his warmth was helping to steady the taller man even a little, Gavin went back to thinking aloud. “I can’t believe they’ve been doing this right under our noses this entire time.” He rubbed the bottom of his sternum with his empty hand, a dull ache forming; he was beginning to feel quite tired. “How could I have missed this? Geoff was right; I’m such a bloody _idiot_ -”

“We all missed it, Gav,” Michael interrupted. “You can’t blame yourself.”

Gavin huffed loudly. “Yeah but this was my case, my responsibility! So many _terrible_ things could have been prevented if I’d just pulled my head out of my arse and _looked closer!_ ”

There was a soft noise next to him and then Ryan was shifting so he could wrap Gavin up in his arms. “It’s not your fault,” he said, burying his face into Gavin’s hair. “But you _can_ fix it. _We_ can fix it, I know we can.”

Letting his body sag a little into Ryan’s warmth, Gavin felt his anger at himself dissipate. “How?”

Ryan pulled back but kept his hand still tightly entwined with Gavin’s. “We’ll start by going down to storage and destroying every single artifact in there that’s connected to Ichthis.”

For a moment, Gavin thought that was the most brilliant idea he’d heard in his entire life. But then he remembered that a large part of the entity was probably already in their world – they needed to send that away first.

“ _You abso_ _-fucking-_ _lutely will not!_ ” Trevor yelled from the other line.

Ignoring him, Gavin responded to Ryan. “As much as I’d like that, I think we’ll be needing them around for a bit longer.” Everyone in the lab, especially Ryan, looked at him in astonishment. “If the Throne has been successful in bringing a portion of Ichthis’ power through the conduit already, then we need to first either eliminate it or send it back,” he explained. “Since I doubt the Archives has the ability to actually destroy even a small part of an entity, we’ll have to figure out a way to force him back through the way he came. Can’t do that if the circuit is destroyed.”

“Or we could send him through the gate itself,” Matt suggested.

Curiosity pulled Gavin from his overwhelming thoughts. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I have a feeling that this specific circuit is a one way, meaning that it’d be impossible to send anything the other way through it. The gateway, on the other hand, should work more like a door, right? So it stands to believe that we could maybe just, like, _push_ the entity back in? Besides, if what I’m suggesting is true, then they’ll be opening their final gate as close to the conduit as possible – we’d have easy access.”

Gavin felt a wide smile grown on his face. “Matt, you absolute mad _genius!_ ” He started walking back to the whiteboard, unintentionally dragging Ryan along with him due to the fact that he refused to let go of the older man’s hand. “We can use their own ritual against them somehow, turn their own trap against them and send that bloody Ichthis back to where he came from.”

“How do you plan on doing that?” Michael asked, though his expression clearly said he was up to the challenge, the beginnings of his trademark devilish smirk starting to show.

Gavin grinned at him. “I dunno yet but I’m sure Trevor can help us find some useful items down there in his cave. Ain’t that right, Tre?”

Trevor’s chuckle came across slightly tinny through the speakers of Jeremy’s phone. “ _Hell yeah_.”

Beside him, Ryan remained quiet, his features pensive. It was like he was in deep thought, lost in a world Gavin couldn’t quite reach. He pulled the older man closer to him again, ducking his head a little so he could look Ryan in the eyes. Rings of bright blue swimming in inky black stared back.

“What am I supposed to do during all this?” Ryan asked softly. “If the Throne’s going to be in the building, I don’t really know what will happen.”

“I’m keeping you safely hidden away, probably in my office – I’ve got some good wards up in there.”

Ryan blanched. “No, I-” he cleared his throat. “I at least want to help.”

“Absolutely not! I refuse to let the Throne get within a hundred feet of you ever again.”

“But-”

“Ryan, please,” Gavin pleaded, allowing his voice to go quiet and low. “Please do this for me. You have to be safe, alright? I won’t let them touch you, I won’t let you be Overtaken again.” When it appeared that Ryan wasn’t going to say anything more, just stand there with his brows furrowed, Gavin reach up to put a hand on the side of his face. “Help us set everything up but when it comes down to it, lock yourself in my office, ok?”

Reluctance was clear on Ryan’s face but he acquiesced. “Ok.”

“Not to interrupt your moment but when should we do this thing? How’re we gonna know when the Throne’s planning on making their move?” Michael asked with slight humor lacing his words.

Gavin extracted himself from Ryan and looked at the other three. “We can start getting things ready tomorrow, I think, figure out a plan of sorts. I have a theory that the artifacts themselves might notify us if – sorry, _when_ things start happening.” He turned towards the phone. “Trevor, could you put together a list of items that might be of use to us?”

“ _Aye aye, captain, I’ll start on it first thing in the morning – I’ve already got a few ideas_.”

“Good. Matt, you and I are going to scour this damn book again for anything else that could help. I want to be as prepared as we can be since the Throne could fully activate the conduit at any point.” Matt nodded along, scooping up a few loose papers from the table. “Michael and Jeremy, I want you guys down in storage tomorrow helping Trevor clear out some space – I don’t know how much we’ll need but I don’t want anything damaged that doesn’t have to be.”

Trevor scoffed indignantly. “ _Preferably nothing, thank you very much._ ”

“Right then, everybody go home – it’s far passed any of our bedtimes.”

Jeremy turned his phone off speaker mode and pressed it to his ear to talk to Trevor some more. As he left the lab, he turned and gave a two finger salute. Michael clapped Gavin on the shoulder and followed, Matt close behind him. When it was just the two of them, Gavin let go of Ryan’s hand and moved instead to slide both of his arms around the other man’s waist, his fingers slipping ever so slightly under the hem of his shirt to touch warm skin, his head tucked face-first into Ryan’s broad chest. He inhaled deeply, held it for a few seconds, and then let it all out in one long whoosh. Fatigue gripped tightly at his bones.

Ryan leaned down slightly to place a lingering kiss to the top of Gavin’s head, murmuring his next words into the soft blonde hair. “Everything about this sucks.”

A short huff was all the laugh Gavin had the energy to produce. “At least we’re not alone in this.” He felt Ryan’s answering smile against his head. After a few long minutes of just standing there and holding each other, Gavin finally let go of Ryan and grabbed his hand once more. “Come on, I guess we should probably get some sleep too.”

“Good thing we don’t have far to go, huh?”

Gavin smiled. “Yeah, that’s a plus.”

The elevator ride up to the level with their room on it was short and quiet, neither of them bothering to speak but still leaning against each other, the silence comforting in its own way. They went through their nightly routines on autopilot and were soon bundled up under the covers, bodies as close as they could get, Gavin curled up against Ryan’s front with one knee slotted between the other man’s. Warmth flowed between them and Gavin felt at ease despite their earlier discoveries.

Tilting his head up to try and get a goodnight kiss, Gavin was instead met with Ryan’s intense gaze, an unreadable expression on his face.

“Are you ok?” Gavin whispered, his lips barely a centimeter from Ryan’s.

Ryan’s answering smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I’ll be alright.”

“Hmm.” Gavin shifted a little so that their faces were on an even level. Studying Ryan’s face, all of his tiny freckles and shallow wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, he moved slowly to place a feather-light kiss on Ryan’s mouth. “You’re so beautiful.”

Something shifted in Ryan’s stare. “I’m not-”

Gavin cut him off with another kiss, this one with a little more intent behind it. “Nope, nuh-uh, there will be no arguing on the matter – you are beautiful and wonderful and handso-”

This time it was Ryan who stopped Gavin with a kiss. It was slow and deliberate, soft enough to send tingles down Gavin’s spine but strong enough to take his breath away. In no world would he ever get tired of kissing this man.

When they eventually broke apart, Gavin settled back into Ryan’s chest, laying another small kiss against the other man’s collarbone. “Sleep now – we can worry about things tomorrow.”

Ryan remained quiet but started to lazily draw random patterns on Gavin’s back with the hand he had curled around the Brit’s waist. Lulled into a gentle doze by the action, Gavin barely heard Ryan’s next words.

“Gavin?”

“Hmm.”

There was silent moment where Ryan fingers paused their ministrations. “I-”

Gavin waited but the sentence was never finished. He shifted a little, rubbing his nose against Ryan’s bare chest. There was a hitched breath, a single moment where time seemed to stop, and then patterns were once again being traced on Gavin’s skin.

“Nevermind.” Ryan pressed another kiss to the top of Gavin’s head. “Goodnight, Gavin.”

But Gavin was already fast asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do I keep ending chapters with the two of them in bed? Yes. Will it happen again? Probably.
> 
> Yell at me about it on [Tumblr](http://toasterness.tumblr.com).


	12. Do Not Go Gentle

It was a Tuesday when everything went to hell.

Trevor, Jeremy, and Matt were down in artifact storage preparing for the inevitable destruction that was looming on the horizon. Trevor – bless his detail-oriented little heart – had started sorting everything by entity _months_ ago so it was fairly easy to move things to safety while keeping them organized. Granted, this system was also a big contributing factor to why the Throne was able to make such a powerful conduit in the first place but he couldn’t really be blamed for that.

The three of them and Ryan had spent the last week and a half moving non-Throne related artifacts to other locations within the Archives and spreading out those Marked by Ichthis in an attempt to weaken the potential portal. They needed the conduit to still be active so as not to alert the cultists but the less of the Prince of Slaughter let through, the better. A fight was inescapable – the least they could do was try to minimize the fallout.

For most of this process, Ryan had been helping Trevor with sorting and assigning locations to all sorts of different items. He’d seen a display case containing several innocuous pieces of jewelry that, when under direct light, seemed to leak a pus-like green fluid; there was a cabinet with a massive padlock on the front that shook violently when they moved it; dozens of boxes were sealed tight with iron bands around them, Trevor being very clear on the fact that under no circumstances were they to ever be opened and that extreme care must be taken when transporting them. Overall, they were the kinds of weird things that Ryan expected to find in a place like the Archives – strange, fascinating, and utterly otherworldly, things that he would have never come up with in his wildest dreams.

Despite all of their preparations, there wasn’t really a plan of action – mostly they hoped that the precautions now in place would allow some time to stop the Throne when they arrived. They had the chime of closing but there was no telling if even that was powerful enough to shut a portal the size that they expected this one to be. The team was in the process of setting up a couple large nets that could be dropped on the cultists to incapacitate them and had amassed a variety of new tools from the collection to fight them off. Ryan knew that these precautions weren’t going to be enough but he also didn’t know what else could be done. It was terrifying, not knowing when disaster would strike; the tension buzzed under his skin like a second heartbeat.

Gavin spent all of his time in either the lab or his office, pouring over all of his notes, frantically trying to come up with a more concrete solution for sending Ichthis back through the gate and closing it. Ryan had to bring him food or else he’d forget to eat, and then drag him to their room at night or Gavin would just pass out at his desk. The few hours they spent together in bed was the only time that Ryan felt anything akin to peace and even then it was marred by his nightmares, which seemed to only be getting more vivid and gruesome. He would fall asleep holding on tightly to Gavin and wake up shaking in the Brit’s arms, cold sweat mirroring the ichor that swallowed him up in his dreams and the slow trickle of dark fluid dripping from his nose.

When it all came crashing down, Ryan was with Gavin in his office eating a late night snack of cheese and crackers while seated closely together on the floor. He could feel it – a sickening, bone-tingling vibration that started in his gut before traveling up his spine to radiate into his skull. Pressure built up behind his eyes and Ryan was sure that his teeth were going to crack with how tight he was grinding his jaw. Despite having all of the lights on in the room, the shadows seemed to grow, swirling and expanding into tendrils of darkness that spread through the room, reaching out to him from the edges of his vision. He dropped his food and seized Gavin’s thigh in a bruising grip.

Something was going terribly wrong.

“Ryan?” Gavin stared at him with worried eyes, his own hand going to rest on top of Ryan’s.

Practically gasping with how tight his lungs had started to feel, Ryan started to shiver. His ears popped. “They’re here.”

A second after he finished speaking, the blaring cry of the security alarm sounded from out in the hall; the Throne had breached archive storage.

Gavin stood up quickly, sending his plate of food clattering to the ground. “Who’s down in storage right now?”

“Trevor, Matt, and Jeremy,” Ryan ground out between clenched teeth as he got to his feet as well, vertigo sweeping through him and almost knocking him back over.

“I need to go.” Gavin declared, turning to put his palm against the taller man’s chest as Ryan tried to follow. “No, you have to stay in here.”

Ryan refused. “You can’t – I have to go with you-”

“Please, Ryan, we talked about this!” Gavin sounded desperate, his hand now grasping the front of Ryan’s shirt. “The Throne is here for you, you have to stay away from them at all costs!”

“But I can help!” Ryan argued, the pain behind his eyes building enough to make him cringe.

It was clear that Gavin saw this by the way his eyes grew more distressed. “I will not let them touch you.”

Suddenly Ryan was being shoved back with enough force that he stumbled, almost tipping over Gavin’s cluttered desk. Gavin used this distraction to rip the door open and rush out. Just before he slammed the door shut, the Brit took out a familiar looking tuning fork and Ryan’s stomach fell – the special artifact that sealed doors and locks. He lurched forward but was too slow.

A loud, clear tone rang out from the other side of the door and Gavin’s frantic but muffled voice followed. “I’m sorry Ryan, I had to, I had to, I’ll be back soon, I promise!”

“Gavin!” Ryan bellowed as he fruitlessly shook the door handle, slamming himself against the unmoving obstacle. “ _Gavin, please!_ ”

There was no response, just the grating sound of the alarm.

“No no no no no, this can’t be happening-” Ryan fell to his knees, hand still clutching the handle. His breaths were now coming in hiccuping gasps, his heart beating far too fast to be healthy, the distinct beginnings of a panic attack flaring up in his chest. Unable to stop it, Ryan collapsed to the floor and curled into himself to let it wash over him. Out of the corners of his eyes he saw the shadows in the room continue to creep towards him and he moaned, his lungs constricting till it was difficult to take in full breaths and he was reduced to a panting mess.

Who knows how long he lay there – ten, maybe fifteen minutes? – before Ryan felt strong enough to sit up. At this point, the shadows were mere inches away from where his head had just been. He shuffled backwards till his shoulders hit the door, eyes wide as he stared at the inky tendrils, then stood back up, determination growing within – he had to get to Gavin. He refused to be left behind.

But how was he supposed to get out of the office? Gavin had locked it with that damned chime! Ryan looked back at the encroaching darkness and willed himself to think of something, _anything_ to get out. When nothing smart revealed itself, he went with the only option left: force the door open by any means necessary.

With a loud roar, Ryan stepped back just enough to give himself room to ram his whole body into it; the hinges rattled but stayed in place. He reared back and tried again, still with the same result. He felt something sting his ankle and when he looked down, a black tentacle had wrapped itself around the joint and had begun trying to pull him backward.

“Oh no you don’t,” he snarled, using his other foot to stomp on the tendril, breaking its hold.

Despite this small success, fear had settled in Ryan’s chest and was beginning to spread, the shadowy coils across from him starting to multiply and spread out more and more. He turned towards the door again, gathered his strength, and charged – nothing. He tried again and again and again but to no avail. He had to aggressively shake off several more shadows between each attempt, their frequency increasing rapidly.

A thick rage began to fill him after his sixth or seventh attempt, a well-known boiling anger that spread outward from the middle of his chest all the way down to his fingers and toes. It burned deep in his heart till all he could feel was fury. Ryan knew that this was bad, that this could end with him losing himself again, but he had to get out of this room, both to get to Gavin and to escape the darkness that was clamoring for him. He let the hostility do what it needed to him and slammed into the door for an eighth time.

It still refused to open but Ryan could hear the frame creaking and saw little cracks forming along its edges, so he allowed more wrath to live him and tried again; more cracks formed and chips of paint fell to the ground. He released even more anger and let it change him, warp his body into a form that could wrench the doors off its hinges. Every fiber of his being was telling him that he needed to stop but he couldn’t, not when so much hung in the balance – not when Gavin was in danger.

The final attack had the office door bursting open so hard that it slammed into the outside wall and broke off half its hinges. Ryan stumbled out, head swimming, his lungs pulling in as much air as they could. The alarm was so much louder out in the hall as it echoed down the corridor, the flashing red lights needles in Ryan’s vision. He knew without checking that he had too many eyes again, opening all over his skin, and that he’d let the _thing_ within him alter his body. But it had to be done.

Looking back, Ryan saw that the shadows were now spilling out of Gavin’s office like living things, snakes of darkness that reached out towards him, faint whispers in his mind calling out. Without much more thought, he tore off down the hall to the stairs and began running down them as fast as he could, practically tripping in his rush to get away. The closer he got to where the others were, the more voices started speaking in his head.

As soon as he wrenched the door open into the storage bay, Ryan was met with the overpowering scent of ozone, oil, and something sickeningly sweet that clung to the inside of his nose and throat like honey. He was barely able to hold back a coughing fit while he wildly scanned the large room for any sign of Gavin. It was a difficult task; the space was a complete disaster, dozens of boxes shattered open with their varied contents spread messily all over the ground and multiple bodies already lying motionless next to them, their blood mixing with black ooze to stain the concrete. Amidst the carnage, twenty five or so robed figures that held jagged knives in their hands battled his friends, outnumbering them three to one. How the hell had they gotten in?

In the middle of the fray, Michael once again wielded that bloody sword, the one that he explained was Marked by the Iron Crown, his eyes glowing a radiant crimson as he cut down anyone who came near; Lindsay was reading from a book bound in patchwork leather, those cultists who were unfortunate enough to hear her words succumbing to some great force that caused them to drop to their knees and clutch their heads as blood leaked from their noses; off to one side, Jeremy bled from a long slash across his chest as he cracked a long, wicked looking whip with a silver spined tip, his actions vicious and his teeth bared in a snarl; Trevor stood next to Jeremy holding purple flames in gloved hands, flinging smoldering orbs at those who fell to the whip, while Matt and Alfredo scattered what looked like white ash around the perimeter of the fight.

Throughout the huge room, green light reflected unnaturally off of every surface, beams of it streaking through empty air to weave a neon tapestry over everything. Ryan could feel the power radiating off of them, felt it seep into his bones and fuel him like some sort of perverse charging station. He followed the gleaming lines across to where they originated from, stomach churning at the sight; an enormous, gaping hole in the far wall had formed, an unfathomable amount of black ichor spilling forth from it, squirming and stretching out like it wanted to grab a hold of everything in front of it – the portal had opened.

Several of the cultists looked over at Ryan when he entered, crying out that the Vessel had arrived and that they could begin the ritual. A couple of them lunged at him but Jeremy’s whip violently stopped their progress. Still more Throne members noticed his presence and the other Archive staff had to work even harder to prevent the cultists from progressing. In the background, what Ryan knew was Ichthis flailed it’s many disgusting arms and the voices in his head grew louder.

He watched in horror as one of those reaching tentacles found purchase on the leg of a cultist; the man was lifted into the air, his tortured scream quickly cut off as he was dragged into the writhing mass. Clearly the thing had no qualms devouring its own worshipers. For a terrifying second, Ryan feared that Gavin had fallen victim to the same fate, but then he heard a strained shout from off to his right and when he looked, he saw the top of the Brit’s head behind a large crate.

He ran towards Gavin, weaving behind and between boxes and shelves till he stood next to him.

“Gavin!” He cried as he skidded to a stop, his voice coming out in rough layers, like there was more than one person speaking at once.

The other man turned to him with wide eyes, his shaking hands still stretched out in front of him towards the gate. “How – what’re you – Ryan, you can’t _be_ here!” He let one arm fall and reached out to lay his fingers on Ryan’s cheek, just under his eye. “What have you done?”

Ryan knew what Gavin was seeing – multiple disturbing black eyes radiating a sallow green light and a mouth full of too-sharp teeth. He knew that he looked disgusting, that he had allowed the monster within to surface again. But there had been no other way to escape the office and to reach Gavin, and now that they were together, the need to protect the younger man was the only thing that Ryan was absolutely sure about.

“I had to Gavin, I had to find you.” He placed one of his own hands on top of Gavin’s, careful of the claws that now tipped his fingers.

“No, no, we’ve got this covered, you need to go back upstairs, leave the building if you can!”

They both flinched and turned back to the room when someone cried out in pain – Jeremy had taken a dagger to the shoulder. He ripped it out and flung it back at the cultist who threw it, nailing them in the belly. Blood splattered all over the floor to mix with what was already covering it.

“I can’t do that,” Ryan rasped, turning back to look at Gavin. “The shadows are everywhere, I can’t escape them – this is our only chance to stop the Reconstruction and I _know_ I have to be here, I know I do.”

Gavin looked torn, eyes flicking back and forth between Ryan and the entity spilling out of the Gate. “I don’t – Ryan, I don’t know what to _do_. The chime isn’t strong enough to close the portal and I’m only able to slow the transfer process; I can’t stop it-”

For a second, Ryan couldn’t answer him; what could he say that would mean anything? He didn’t have a clue what to do either. Then, breaking past the voices practically shouting now in his head, he was hit with the realization that not only did he need to be there but he needed to be the one to close the gate, he needed to be the one to confront Ichthis and send him back into the void he came from. He needed to remove the seed that sat festering in his soul. Along with this epiphany, a sense of calming purpose enveloped him, slowing his heartbeat. He smiled sadly at Gavin.

“I can close the gate.”

Gavin looked confused at first but this rapidly changed to an expression of alarm; he dropped his other arm and gripped Ryan’s shoulders. “You can’t be serious.”

“It has to be me,” Ryan assured him. “I don’t know why or how but it has to be me.”

“What are you going to do?” Gavin’s hands trembled as he tightened his hold.

“I think – I think I need to go to it, go to its center. I need to get it out of me.”

Understanding flashed across Gavin’s face and he pulled Ryan into a crushing embrace. “You can’t! That’s just what they want – what _he_ wants! He’ll Overtake you again!”

And Ryan knew that, knew that there was little chance that he wouldn’t be lost forever inside the roiling darkness, but he had to at least try. He extracted himself enough to cup Gavin’s face gently with both hands. “He’s already in my head, Gavin, right now – it’s already too late.”

“No no no, _please_ Ryan, there has to be another way!”

Ryan stroked his thumbs across Gavin’s cheekbones. “I have to do this, it’s the only way to protect you.”

“I can’t – I can’t lose you-”

“Shh, I’ll be ok.” Sorrow laced his words as he looked deeply into Gavin’s eyes; it hurt to lie. “You’ll be ok.”

Gavin sobbed, his whole body shaking now. “I won’t be though, not without you.”

As the room around them descended further and further into chaos and the screams of cultists and Archive staff continued to fill the air, Ryan could only see the beautiful man in front of him, Gavin’s green eyes red-rimmed and tired as tears flowed freely from them. If he was allowed one request, one last wish while on this mortal plain, Ryan would ask to remain here for just a few moments longer so he could memorize the face of the man he – well, of the man he was willing to sacrifice himself for. It was a hopeless desire but then again, what wasn’t hopeless about him?

Ryan pressed their foreheads together. “I’m sorry.”

With a shaky breath and a moment of pause, Gavin tipped forward to kiss him. It was bittersweet and rough, desperate and final, rich with the salty taste of sadness and something entirely indescribable. Then, like the opposite of a slow thaw, Ryan felt the intimate rush of Gavin’s power diffuse its coolness into him. He pulled back just enough to free his speech, voice still rough with that strange multi-tone.

“What-”

“I will try to keep you safe for as long as I can,” Gavin whispered against his lips. “I failed you once, I refuse to fail you again.” His hands slipped down to lay flat on Ryan’s chest. “Come back to me, ok?”

With any words he might have said caught in his throat, Ryan kissed Gavin one last time, his lips lingering for just a second longer. “Goodbye, Gavin.”

Leaving Gavin behind was the hardest thing Ryan had ever had to do – it was like ripping out a piece of himself and throwing it into a fire. But he did it because he knew he had to, that it was the only way to stop the end of the world. The feeling of Gavin’s power pulsed deep and cold in his chest to the beat of his own heart, giving him the strength to turn away and walk towards the ever-expanding mass and the gate it erupted from. He heard his friends shouting at him as he went and watched numerous members of the Throne move out of the way to let him pass unhindered as if they had expected this and knew what he was planning on doing. He ignored them all.

The voices in his head screamed in victory as he walked straight into the ichor and let himself be swallowed whole.

……..

Years of experience dealing with the unexplainable and bizarre had provided Gavin with the tools and tricks to survive a wide variety of situations. Like, for instance, trapping a spider the size of a Jack Russel terrier and subsequently using it to hunt down its own nest, or collecting the shattered pieces of a porcelain death mask that frequently caused people to commit unspeakable crimes, or even shutting down an entire secret lab that researched how best to infect someone with flesh eating bacteria by using dolls. He’d dealt with cases like these and countless others without a problem to speak of and with rarely a bad result.

But this – this was a whole other ballgame.

Locking Ryan in the office had already seemed like an objectively shitty plan when he’d done it but as soon as Gavin got to the storage facilities, he was glad he had; there were far too many Throne cultists and the gate had clearly already been opened, the disgusting form of Ichthis spilling out into the room – it was too dangerous for Ryan to be there, the risk of him losing control far too high to chance it. Gavin’s top priority was keeping the other man safe and at least there was a better chance of that thanks to his own mild betrayal.

Except all of that, all of their preparations and cautions, had been pointless and now Gavin was watching Ryan walk away from him, straight into the waiting arms of darkness that quickly enveloped him in their oily grasp, heedless of everything going on round him – a dead man walking. Nothing could have prepared Gavin for that.

It hurt. Oh god did it hurt. None of the pain he had ever experienced before in his life – no injury or heartbreak or nightmare – would ever compare to the pure anguish that threatened to bring Gavin to his knees at that moment. Even the marrow-deep exhaustion that he felt couldn’t hold a candle to the void that now invaded his chest where his heart should have been pounding. A scream bubbled up in his throat but got caught halfway, his breaths coming in sharp pants as he tried in vain to seek out Ryan’s form in the black ooze.

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go; Ryan was supposed to stay in Gavin’s office, away from all of the fighting while the rest of them closed the gate and got rid of all the cultists. In no world had Gavin ever planned on watching Ryan sacrifice himself, nor did he ever think he would just let the man do so. It just didn’t make _sense_ and he _hated it_.

He didn’t have time to dwell though; the cultists still outnumbered them and they still had to try and close the gate, with or without Ryan’s help. Gavin shook his head to try and clear it, only managing a slight success. A few feet in front of him there was one of the Throne’s freaky blades next to the lifeless corpse of a cultist, so he gathered it up, ignoring the sticky feeling of blood on the handle.

Gavin knew that he was running on fumes, his energy almost depleted from how much of the Maze’s power he had already used trying to push Ichthis back through the gate. Kissing Ryan and transferring a large portion of what little energy remained had taken its toll as well, though he regretted none of it; if it helped Ryan stay alive, stay himself, he’d do it a thousand times.

With knife in hand, Gavin ran around the edge of the fighting till he stood next to Lindsay as she chanted the deadly words written in the language of Veros, cultist after cultist getting caught in her thrall and eventually succumbing to the Voice of Death. He used the Throne’s own blade against them to fend off those that came too close and who weren’t entranced by Lindsay’s speech. One of them sprinted directly at him from the side, causing Gavin to dart in the opposite direction, narrowly missing taking a knife to the ribs. In retaliation, he swung his own blade wildly and sliced clean through his attackers throat. The hot spray of arterial blood didn’t bother him nearly as much as it should have.

Several yards away, closest to the pile of sludge that encased Ryan, Michael and Jeremy stood on either side of a downed Trevor, who still chucked flames while he clutched at his bleeding thigh. Michael’s eyes burned brightly and his mouth was twisted into a feral smile but he stood his ground to defend his friends, sword flashing as it clashed with the cultists’ weapons, their ritual blades producing sparks every time they met with Michael’s sword or the tip of Jeremy’s whip. Gavin felt a swell of pride at how hard his team was fighting back.

But the Throne were armed with more than just their knives; every so often a green light would flare and slash out from one of their hands to land a heavy blow. How were they supposed to defend themselves from that? He and Lindsay kept having to duck out of the way of the beams, though neither of them could avoid all of the shots sent their way; they each took a couple hits, the beams burning aggressively on contact like they’d been hit by acid. Matt and Alfredo were nowhere to be seen and Gavin could only hope that they were ok.

There came a point around fifteen minutes later when Gavin knew that they had failed; Michael was now wielding the Sword of Vices in one hand, left arm bleeding just as much as his Marked blade, and Jeremy had abandoned his whip in favor of bodily wrestling cultists to the ground and beating them into submission, Trevor weakly firing small bolts of fire at anyone who tried to pull Jeremy off. Lindsay couldn’t read fast enough anymore and Gavin was struggling to protect her, his body almost completely bereft of energy. Matt and Alfredo had reappeared but all they could do was keep replacing the ash, which at least seemed to be doing its job of preventing anyone from escaping past it. There were still too many Throne members left though and Ryan hadn’t emerged from the black mass yet.

Everything was for naught. How they had ever thought they could stop the summoning of an entity as powerful as the Prince of Slaughter, Gavin would never know; he had been arrogant to believe that they stood even the slightest chance, his hubris ultimately leading to their downfall. There had been plenty of hope, of course – it was what stood as the backbone of so many of humanity’s greatest triumphs, after all – but what was hope in the face of unimaginable horror? He had failed Ryan, he had failed his friends, and he had failed the world. This was surely the end of all things. His only regret was not telling Ryan the full extent of his feelings while he had the chance.

And then, like they had all been paused by some great cosmic remote, every single cultist stopped moving at the exact same time. They turned to face the gate, those that were already in combat immediately being either killed or beaten to unconsciousness. Gavin stopped his attacks too so he could watch, the others quickly following suit. A second later and a short figure right at the edge of the conflict pulled off its hood, revealing an extremely old man with a bald head and sunken, empty eye sockets, scars around the edges suggesting they had been clawed out. He wailed, sounding for all the world like he’d been gravely wounded, and reached out a gnarled hand towards the pile of repulsive tentacles and slime. Soon, the other hooded figures all did the same, their faces marked in a similarly disturbing manner as their elder.

The red in Michael’s eyes was fading while he watched it all happen. “What the fuck-”

But he was drowned out by the wailing as it increased in volume. What were they seeing that Gavin could not? He couldn’t move, his body frozen to the spot, his eyes scanning desperately for anything that was different. None of the others moved either, all of them staring wildly at the screaming cultists. Nothing about the mass had changed – Ichthis still swelled with false breath, still squirmed and writhed like a ball of earthworms – so what was it that was causing a terrible gut-wrenching feeling in his gut?

Then Gavin watched as the ichor slowly retreated, the cultists abruptly ceasing their cries. At first he was relieved – maybe they _had_ been successful! – but that was quickly replaced by an image so terrifying that it shook Gavin to his core; Ryan’s face, slowly appearing from the depths of slime, mouth wide open and black tentacles pulsing forcefully down his throat.

Ichthis wasn’t disappearing back through the gate – he was finally filling up his Vessel.

The Reconstruction had begun.

Ryan was gone.

……..

Time is a funny thing, isn’t it? An arbitrary delineation of an abstract concept that rules over everything in life. It was a person’s most valuable resource, a commodity traded for love and money. Time could be bought and sold, wasted and treasured. There was never enough of it yet it never slowed down or stopped. Time was a false forever.

But here, here in the darkness, Ryan felt unburdened by time. Here, there were no deadlines or pressing matters, no aging or loss, only emptiness. There was comfort in nothingness, he decided; there’s no need to think about anything when there’s nothing to think about.

He had no idea how long he floated or how long he would continue to do so. Everything seemed so inconsequential in the infinite blackness.

In the back of his mind Ryan knew that he didn’t belong here, knew that there was some place else he needed to be. There was a faint light in him that beat along with his heart and told him that someone was waiting for him. But who? Who wants a man made of nothing?

“No one does.”

Ryan did not fear this new voice – he knewit, hears it every time he speaks. Turning, he came face to face with himself, the only thing visible in the endless darkness.

“You are alone,” the Other Him said. “No one could want you.”

“Then why do I feel like I am missing something?” Ryan asked his twin.

The other Ryan’s mouth opened in a grin that had more teeth than could possibly fit and widened past where it should stop; it looked painful. “ **You are empty because I am meant to fill you. You were** _ **made**_ **to be mine**.” The voice was layered now, several deep voices speaking at once.

There was truth in those words and Ryan knew it. But the little glowing ball at his core was still telling him that there was someone who needed him to come back and it wasn’tthis warped reflection.

“No, I don’t think that’s it,” he explained to Other Ryan.

That shark-like grin grew impossibly larger. “ **I am already inside you. I** _ **am**_ **you. You cannot escape what is inevitable;** **I am the Prince of Slaughter and** **you are my Vessel**.”

Ryan didn’t want to be anybody’s Vessel – he wanted to go _home_.

But where was home? Did he even have one to go back to? His apartment wasn’t safe anymore, he didn’t have any family or friends, the only place he’d ever felt safe had come under attack all because of him – there was nowhere for him to go.

Except, that wasn’t quite true, was it? He had Gavin. Brilliant, clever, loyal Gavin, who promised Ryan he’d keep him safe and who was the best thing that had ever happened to him, who looked at his disfigured features and saw beauty instead of a monster. Gavin was his home; wherever he was, that’s where Ryan wanted to be.

The light was growing in his chest, expanding out in cool waves that filled him with courage and assured him that what he was feeling was real. “You’re wrong.” Ryan let the energy course through his veins uninhibited. “I will not be used.”

Other Ryan stopped smiling, his expression turning to one of fury. His form started to morph into the heinous thing that Ryan had turned into that night at the docks but then it kept changing, mutating beyond any conceivable thought, a maddening number of misshapen and elongated limbs and blackened eyes that hurt to look at. Was this what he would become if he let Ichthis fully take over? Or was that just what he’d always been inside?

“ **You will not deny me what is mine!** ” The thing roared in a voice that felt like knives in Ryan’s ears. It lunged.

Ryan had barely enough time to put his hands up before the Other Him attacked. Gavin’s power – because that’s what that was, wasn’t it? That ball of cold fire that lit him up from inside? – burst forth from his fingers just as the first transformed appendage made contact. His skin burned where they touched but the creature flinched back like it too had been scalded. Ryan pushed a little more, remembering Gavin explaining to him how his power worked; he needed to force it all out and into the Other Ryan, into Ichthis itself, and then maybe he could send the entity back to where it came from.

One of Other Ryan’s tentacles turned rigid and shot out like a lance, impaling Ryan’s side and piercing all the way through to emerge out of his back covered in blood and viscera. Pain so intense that he felt bile rise in his throat burst forth from the impact, causing his vision to white out on the edges, his cries unnoticeable beneath the snarling of Ichthis’ many mouths. Another blade-like appendage sliced him open at the collarbone, hot, searing agony almost causing Ryan to collapse. He valiantly tried to fight back but moving around the thick tentacle in his side that was now wriggling in his guts was excruciating. Gavin’s power flared and Ryan was able to just barely hold himself up.

Underneath the flame of comforting light thrummed a darker power, one made of shadows and fear – the remnants of decades of selective breeding and black sacraments that made Ryan who he was. No matter how much he rejected the Prince of Slaughter, part of it would always live in him; that was his curse, the fate that had always awaited him. So Ryan latched onto that feeling and drew it out, intent on using it to his advantage no mater the consequences.

He felt his body change in response; he felt the dozens of extra eyes open, his teeth grow to razor sharp points, his spine stretch. It was painful in a way that he would never be able to describe but it was what he had to do. Forcing the darkness to meld with the chill of Gavin’s power, Ryan reached out further and _pushed_.

The Other Ryan screamed – nails on a chalkboard, fork on a ceramic plate, feedback from a speaker – and lurched forward at him again, murder written all over its disgusting features, several more mouths opening and their tongues lashing out. Tendrils darker than the boundless nothingness that surrounded them wrapped around Ryan’s throat and tightened but he just pushed harder, his own claw-like hands ripping and tearing whatever parts of Ichthis that he could reach to pieces. It didn’t feel like it was working though; he was quickly becoming entangled, overwhelmed by the shear _amount_ of Other Ryan there was.

Just when he thought it was all over, that he was going to be swallowed whole for a second time that day, Ryan felt a surge of _something_ from deep inside; it was warm this time, indefinable and shapeless – a single mote of pure happiness.

_Come back to me, ok?_

With one final surge of resoluteness, Ryan let loose every single last ounce of energy left, gilded and blinding light spilling out and into Other Ryan. The entity screeched in pain as cracks appeared all over its body, golden fluid seeping out and dripping onto the unseen floor.

“You cannot have me!” Ryan roared in a voice that shook the very air, clear and wholly his own.

“ **No!** ” Ichthis shrieked as it staggered backward, the leaking fissures expanding, more gold blood running in rivulets over its limbs. “ _ **NO!**_ ”

But it was no use; Ryan could see the end approaching, saw the damage he wrought and forced more of it upon the Other Him. The tentacle in his side ripped away leaving a jagged hole that leaked pieces of his organs. He felt a heavy darkness sitting low in his belly and somehow knew what he had to do; he reached one of his hands into the wound, his guts shifting disgustingly between his elongated fingers. There was no way he would survive this but Ryan had to accomplish this one final task. Digging deep, he searched till he found the tiny rotten seed left in him by the Throne and plucked it out, flinging it at the feet of his Maker.

“Leave. Me. _ALONE!_ ”

The world exploded into a golden supernova and Ryan saw no more.

……..

It only lasted five seconds.

Five seconds of absolute silence. Five agonizingly slow seconds of every single person in archive storage staring intently at the prone body of Ryan Haywood, no filthy black ichor anywhere in sight. For Gavin, they were longest five seconds of his life.

Then, like a pocket of oil deep beneath the ground that’s been struck by a drill, all of the vile dark matter erupted out of him, bursting forth from his nose and mouth and eyes, every pore violently ejecting the foul substance. It flew towards the yawning hole in the wall and back through the gate to whatever hellscape it came from while Ryan’s spine arched sharply as he emptied himself of the Prince of Slaughter.

The cultists began to scream again, running full tilt after their master as it fled, desperate to not be left behind. Michael and Jeremy tried to grab a few as they passed them but were unable to do anything besides watch the Throne throw themselves into Ichthis as it surged back into the portal. Every single last one of them disappeared. Gavin could do nothing but drop his knife as his hands went weak and he stared at Ryan’s struggling body, everything moving in fast forward around him but his body remaining stuck.

All at once it was finished; the gate closed with a loud _crack!_ And everyone remaining just stared at the now blank and unmarred concrete wall, all evidence of Ichthis gone. The unmoving bodies of the dead littering the ground were the only indication that something terrible had just happened. Gavin felt heavy, like everything was collapsing and he could do nothing to stop it.

Finally, forcing his body to just _move, dammit_ , Gavin jerked forward and stumbled toward Ryan on ungainly legs. Every step was stilted and he just want to lie down and sleep forever but he needed to see Ryan, needed to know if he – if he –

Gavin’s knees hit the ground right next to Ryan’s right arm. There was no black slime left on him, his jacket, pants, and skin void of any marks or even stains. The other man’s chest lay still, no breaths to make it rise and fall. Shaking, Gavin rested his hand on top of where the other man’s heart should be beating under his ribs but there was nothing.

Nothing nothing nothing.

He let out a dry sob, curling his upper body over Ryan and gathering him into his arms. There wasn’t enough energy in him to cry so Gavin just held Ryan tightly, the lack of a heartbeat louder than any noise in the world.

Behind him, he vaguely registered the sound of the others moving around, but none of that mattered right now; what mattered was that even though the Crimson Throne had been stopped and the Reconstruction prevented, Ryan was still gone.

He was gone.

How could he be gone? How could this have happened?

“It’s all my fault,” Gavin whispered into Ryan’s hair, gently rocking back and forth. “It’s all my f-fault, I’m s-so sorry, i-it’s all m-my fault.”

A warm hand rested itself on Gavin’s shoulder, Michael’s normally comforting presence barely noticeable compared to the despair permeating the room. “Come on Gav, leave him be; there’s nothing we can do.”

Gavin balked. “No! No, I can’t – I-I’m not leaving h-him! He’s not-” He let out another choked sob. “Ryan, p-please, come back to me, you h-have to come b-back to me, _p_ _lease!_ ”

Nothing.

“You _promised!_ ”

Nothing.

Silence. Loud, echoing silence.

And then.

_Ba-dump._

Halting his movements, Gavin reeled back to look at Ryan’s face; he looked just as serene as before, just like he did when he was sleeping, worry lines gone from his face and replaced by a calmness that he didn’t possess when he was awake. Putting two fingers to Ryan’s wrist, Gavin held his breath.

_Ba-dump._

There – a pulse.

“ _Holy shit_ ,” Gavin gasped. “Ryan! I can feel you, I know you’re there!”

Michael let go of his shoulder. “Gavin, what’s going on-”

“I can feel his heart, Michael, he’s _alive_!” With soft, trembling hands, Gavin cradled Ryan’s face and smoothed the hair back from his forehead. “Come on love, open your eyes, can you do that for me?”

Ryan didn’t move. When he checked again for a pulse, Gavin could still feel it, faint but there all the same. Michael shifted awkwardly next to him, stepping back slightly to give them space.

Softly, voice barely a whimper, Gavin spoke into the quiet. “You did it once before, remember? You came back to me. I need you to do it one more time, ok?”

Gavin had never claimed to be a patient man. He was often restless and greedy with his time, unable to sit still for long. He frequently lost focus due to boredom and was known to sometimes take unnecessary risks when things weren’t moving fast enough for his liking. But right now, at the precipice of something either catastrophic or wonderful, he would be willing to wait forever if it meant that Ryan would wake up.

It was, of course, the kiss that Gavin lightly pressed to the crown of Ryan’s head that changed everything.

Some sort of residual power must have been unconsciously passed between them because suddenly Ryan was taking a breath, deep and long and everything that Gavin wanted to hear. It was followed by more, each one as precious as the last.

“That’s it, love, that’s it.” He continued to stroked the gent’s forehead as he murmured quiet encouragements.

Slowly, oh so slowly, Ryan opened his eyes; the black sclera were gone and all that was left were those beautiful blue irises. They were a little brighter, sure, but they were _his_ , and Gavin had never been so happy to see a color before.

“ _Gavin_.” It was barely a whisper, not much more than a sigh, but Ryan’s eyes spoke louder than any words could.

With a laugh that could have been mistaken for another lament, Gavin leaned in and kissed Ryan, both of their mouths tilted up in matching warm smiles. The joy in Gavin’s chest was palpable, radiating from him like sunlight; even Michael, still standing off to the side, chuckled in relief.

“There you are,” Gavin said against Ryan’s lips.

Ryan hummed. “Here I am.” He held up an unsteady hand to cup Gavin’s cheek, adoration in his gaze.

“Don’t you ever scare me like that again, you hear me?” Gavin reprimanded with a voice lacking any real anger. “I’m not built to deal with this much stress-”

“I love you,” Ryan interrupted with a raspy voice. “ _I love you_. I just – I needed you to hear that. I should have said it before.”

Gavin didn’t move. Had he heard that right? He stared at Ryan, unsure of what to do. A flicker of uncertainty passed over the other man’s face and Gavin’s mind finally caught up with itself.

Ryan let out a small grunt as Gavin crashed their lips together hungrily. “God – I love you – so much-” he uttered between kisses.

Sitting up, Ryan wrapped one arm around Gavin’s waist and the other behind his head, pulling them together as close as they could get; Gavin responded in kind, mind focused on nothing but the feeling of Ryan’s  mouth against his. His heart still pounded, the residual fear left inside of him  motivating his desperate actions. This – this was where he was meant to be, secure in Ryan’s arms, both of them safe and alive. It felt unreal.

Not once in Gavin’s life had he thought that he would have something like this.  T he concept of love never really held much interest to him; being tied to another person seemed too  nerve-wracking , too restricting. But Ryan? Ryan was unexpected in the best possible way and Gavin wanted nothing more that to experience a life full of that love. Maybe he’d been afraid before – maybe he’d been ignorant and willfully obtuse – but nothing felt more  _right_ than Ryan’s arms holding him tightly.

Somebody cleared their throat behind him,  startling Gavin from his  wander ing thoughts and  causing  him to break away  from Ryan and turn; Michael  was looking at them with an exasperated expression slightly tinged with pain as he held his wounded arm in his other hand. Lindsay stood next to him, a similar  look on her face.

“If you guys are just about finished, we have some cult motherfuckers to deal with, and some of us need to take a visit to a real hospital.” Michael informed them.

“Ah, yes, sorry,” Gavin stammered. “I’ll, er, help you clean up.”

Lindsay shook her head fondly. “ There’s no need for that right now.  Mat t and Alfredo are already upstairs – they finally called Geoff and Jack .” She glanced at Michael’s arm. “ Orders are to get Trevor and Jeremy to a doctor, and this idiot too.”

“Hey!” Michael objected.

“Oh shush, your  _my_ idiot, so calm down.” With a final reprimanding look at the two of them on the floor, Lindsay tugged on Michael’s arm to lead him towards the exit. “ You both should consider doing the same thing.” Gavin watched as she helped Trevor limp out the door behind a very sluggish Jeremy.

Ryan grimaced. “I suppose we should follow them.” He groaned as he went about the slow process of standing up, Gavin following suit. 

They both staggered a bit but used each other  to  steady themselves and were able to maintain balance.  Gavin watched as Ryan scanned him up and down with his eyes, an almost hungry expression on his face.  Gavin looked down at himself and saw that his tailored white shirt with its sleeve rolled up to his elbows was liberally splattered with blood, most of it from the Throne members that he had fought,  though  he was sure  some of it was his own . He grimaced but when he looked back at Ryan, who’s face continued to reflect  some kind of inner desire, he felt a strange heat swell in his chest.

Ryan shook his head when he realized he’d been staring and started l ooking around the room;  his brows pinched together  as realization dawn ed on him at the sight of all the bodies.  His hands twitched at his sides. “What happened after I – after I went under.”

It wasn’t like Gavin didn’t appreciate the scale and gravity of the situation – even now, his brain was stilling running a mile a minute – but all of the blood, all of the bodies littering the ground? None of it mattered to him whatsoever. Somehow, against all odds, the Prince of Slaughter had been rejected from their reality and his cult of demented followers had gone with him. Maybe being glad that all of them were dead made Gavin a different kind of monster but he couldn’t bring himself to care about that either.

Ryan was alive; that was the most important thing of all.

“We kept fighting,” Gavin stated matter of factly, his eye contact with Ryan steady. “You sacrificed yourself and we kept trying to keep the Throne at bay and figure out a way to somehow close the gate.”

The other man visibly flinched at the word ‘sacrifice’. “I’m sor-”

“No, there’ll be no more apologizing – from either of us; we’ve done enough of that for both of our lifetimes, don’t you think?” Gavin smiled softly. “ Now come on, we should head to the hospital too.”

Ryan tentatively smiled back.  “ Yeah, ok, that sounds good.”

Gavin laced their fingers together – a perfect fit – and started to walk after the others, Ryan falling into step next to him They moved slower than normal, both of them exhausted from everything that had happened but unwilling to stray too far from each other. Gavin spent the whole elevator ride pressed against Ryan’s warm side, grateful for even having that privilege.

Things had almost ended in the worst possible way – they hadn’t been able to close the gate  despite their best efforts and he had almost lost Ryan. Hell, he  _had_ lost Ryan, at least for a little bit. Gavin didn’t know what he would have done if Ryan had never woken up; he wasn’t sure he’d have been able to handle it  at all . The devastation had felt so close, so real, and he never wanted to feel like that again.

But no, he couldn’t think like that – Ryan was alive, he was right there and was himself again. Gavin had to focus on that and that alone.

The elevator door dinged when they reached the main lobby, prompting them to step out and make their way to the front doors. Gavin leaned heavily on Ryan; the effects of using so much of his power made him practically woozy with fatigue. The taller man was a pillar of strength despite his own obvious weariness. Just as they left the building, a dark gray sedan pulled up and parked next to the curb, a haggard looking Geoff jumping out and running towards them.

“What happened?” He demanded as he gathered Gavin tightly into his arms. “Are you alright? Are you hurt?”

Gavin patted Geoff’s back as best he could from the awkward angle his arms were forced into from the hug. “We’re alright, Geoff – I’m alright.”

“Matt called and said Lindsay’s taking the others to the hospital and that you two were still here and that I should get here as fast as I could-”

“Geoff, calm down, we’re headed there now too,” Gavin assured the older man.

“Calm down? _Calm down??_ ” Geoff’s pitch went up as his voice got louder. “You try calming down when you’re woken up in the middle of the night by a call from one of your employees – your _friend –_ telling you that your own idiot of a son and his idiot of a partner are still at the scene of a fucking _murder ritual from hell_ , all after the whole shit show is already fucking _over!_ ” Geoff shook Gavin slightly, his voice cracking a bit as he ranted. “I’ll never be calm again with you around! Either of you!”

For a second, Gavin couldn’t respond; his head was ringing and something was caught in his throat, emotions completely halted while he digested what Geoff had said.

“Did you-” Gavin cleared his throat and pulled away from Geoff’s hold to look him in the eye. “Did you just call me your _son?_ ”

A dark flush spread over the older man’s cheeks. “What of it?” He awkwardly clapped Gavin on the shoulders a couple times before turning away and walking back to the driver’s side of the car. “Now get in the car before I leave you both behind.”

Gavin turned to Ryan with wide eyes, his ears a little warm. “I, er, guess we better go?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said with a teasing smile. “Don’t want to keep your _dad_ waiting.”

“Shut up.” Gavin felt the warmth spread to the rest of his face.

He ignored the way the corners of his own mouth lifted just a tiny bit, Ryan’s low chuckle playful but fond.

It didn’t take them long to get to the hospital. Nobody spoke while they drove; Gavin and Ryan sat close together in the backseat, their hands held tightly between them, as Geoff concentrated on the road and glanced back at them from the mirror every so often. When they reached the hospital, he parked the car and they all got out, Ryan still helping to support Gavin as they walked into the building. Without stopping, Geoff led them to the elevators and then up several floors till they reached a private wing and directed them to a seating area in front of an exam room with large windows.

Looking through the window, Gavin saw that Michael, Jeremy, and Trevor were all sitting on separate beds, Lindsay standing close by her husband as three nurses looked over the injured men. A doctor in blue scrubs and a white coat looked up when Geoff knocked lightly on the window, indicating that he could enter. Before going into the room, Geoff put his hand on the door frame and turned to Gavin and Ryan.

“Wait out here until the doc’s finished,” he told them with a slight grimace on his face. “I’m gonna make sure my other morons aren’t going to lose an arm or something.” He shut the door.

Gavin leaned his head on Ryan’s shoulder and watched as their friends were patched up. The chairs behind him in the waiting area called his name but Gavin knew that if he sat down there was no way he wouldn’t fall asleep as soon as he did. Instead, he focused on what was happening in the exam room.

Michael’s arm had a large gash in it that was being meticulously stitched up by a kind looking nurse; he was speaking with Lindsay, the hand of his uninjured arm linked with hers and their expressions soft. Jeremy was bare-chested and laughing with the nurse who was washing the wound running from his right shoulder to his left hip, and an already bandaged Trevor was being interviewed by the doctor. It made Gavin feel helpless to not be able to help his friends, forced to watch and doing nothing else besides worry, but he told himself it was far better than looking at their corpse.

“What excuse did they give these people to explain all this?” Ryan asked while reaching over to twine his fingers with Gavin’s once again.

“Probably something close to the truth,” Gavin responded. “That’s Dr. Forester, the Archive’s preferred physician – he’s the only one we see when we’re here. He’s used to us coming in with weird symptoms and injuries, and he doesn’t ask too many questions. He’ll have picked the nurses himself to make sure they’re of the same sort.”

Ryan nodded in acknowledgment. “Lucky, then.”

They stood there for several quiet minutes, the occasional call over the hospital-wide intercom the only interruption. Gavin could feel himself drifting off, Ryan’s body a solid comfort and the night’s events fully catching up to him. He finally let his eyes close once he saw that Michael was fully bandaged and Lindsay was holding him in her arms while the other two continued to be cared for. The silence went on until Ryan pulled their clasped hands up to his lips and kissed Gavin’s fingers.

Gavin didn’t bother opening his eyes to respond. “What’s this about?”

“Nothing, I just-” Ryan kissed the Brit’s fingers once more and held them against his chest. “I’m just glad everyone is ok.”

Gavin hummed in agreement.

Ryan didn’t say anything for several long seconds. Then, he turned his head and in a rough but quiet voice spoke into Gavin’s hair. “I was so afraid that I would hurt you again, that if I somehow survived, I wouldn’t be me anymore.”

At this, Gavin did open his eyes. He shifted so he could slip his arms under Ryan’s jacket and wrapped them around the taller man’s waist, their bodies close together with his face against Ryan’s broad chest. Gavin took a steadying breath and moved so his right hand rested just above Ryan’s heart.

“I love you,” he whispered. “I love every part of you, monster or not.” Tilting his head up, he lay a tender kiss on Ryan’s lips. “I will love you even if you grow extra eyes again or your teeth can’t fit in your mouth anymore – you will not hurt me and I will not leave you.”

“Gavin-”

“I’m not finished.” Gavin pressed gently against Ryan’s chest with his palm. “If you start changing again – if it turns out that, that Ichthis hasn’t left you completely, then we’ll deal with that when it happens. But right now, here in this moment, you are you and I am me and we are _together_.” He laughed, a low and throaty thing. “We’re together and we’re _in love_ , Ryan, and that’s such a beautiful thing.”

Ryan stared at him then, newly lucent eyes flicking between Gavin’s own, his expression open and filled with awe. His cheeks were flushed a lovely pink and a single tear slipped from his eye and down his cheek. More soon followed as he let himself cry, a crooked smile growing on his face. Gavin felt his own eyes burn at the sight.

“ _Thank you_ ,” Ryan breathed.

Gavin kissed him then just because he could.

“ Ah fuck, are you guys gonna be doing that all the time now?” 

With a start, Gavin broke away and turned towards the new voice; Michael had stuck his head out of the door and was glaring at them with an exaggerated scowl.

“So what if we did?” Gavin retorted, a  b lush spreading across his  face .

Michael fake gagged. “At least keep it  away from me .”

Appearing behind her husband, Lindsay smiled at Gavin and Ryan. “Leave them alone, Michael;  I think it’s cute!” She leaned in to kiss Michael on the cheek, causing his frown to deepen. “Now come on boys, the doc wants to see you.”

With a matching  rosiness on his  cheeks , Ryan  put his arm around Gavin’s  waist  and walked them both into the exam room. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy shit you guys.
> 
> This chapter was tough to write and is an absolute BEHEMOTH - 5 words under 10k, can you believe? That's practically a fic in of itself. I still can't believe I did it.
> 
> While this may be the 'end' for now, there is still an epilogue coming in the next week, so I'll wait to write up my thank yous till then. Until then, as usual, you can always find me on [Tumblr](http://toasterness.tumblr.com).
> 
> EDIT: Ya'll my ADHD has been kicking my absolute ass this week and I'm still not quite done with the epilogue >.< I'm so sorry! It should be up in a couple more days, depending on my ability to force myself to get it done and how quick alpha and beta readers can get back to me (bless their fucking souls, good lord). Thank you for understanding!


	13. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alternate title: Abandoned Spaghetti

Ryan had been here before – blood, hot and slick, running down his chin as he tore through the throat of his prey, the young woman’s deformed body going slack under his clawed grip as he took them both to the ground, his mouth full of the foul taste of copper and meat gone sour. When he let go and stood back up, he wiped his sleeve over the mess on his face while watching to make sure the Overtaken was really dead. Or, in this case, dead _again –_ it was hard to tell with victims of the Rot.

“Gavin’s gonna kill me for ruining another nice shirt...” he complained while looking down at his formerly white button up that was now soaked in bright crimson.

Behind him, Jeremy just laughed. “Hey, wasn’t I the one who told you to get changed before we left?”

Ryan groaned. “My extra set of clothes was back at home; I haven’t had a chance to do laundry yet!”

Jeremy just continued to chuckle.

It had been almost a year since that fateful day in Archive Storage, a year filled with change after change. Only a few weeks after the fight with the Crimson Throne, Ryan was recruited for the Archives; Geoff didn’t so much ask him to join – he simply chucked a temporary ID card at his face and told him to come in on Monday for a real one. Although nervous at first, afraid that he might not be qualified for the job, Ryan had accepted the offer and was soon training with Jeremy to become a hunter, an agent who tracked down artifacts and dealt with those who got too involved with the unexplainable. The program was tough work but it was far more fulfilling than his former desk job.

On his first real Hunt, he’d gone with Jeremy to take care of a nest being created by followers of the Black Mother. Everything had been going smoothly until an Overtaken had attacked Ryan and he’d lost it, whatever residual power left over in him from being Marked surging to the front and distorting his features. Two extra sets of pitch black eyes had opened above and below his real ones, his teeth had become razor sharp and his tongue too long for his mouth, and shadows had coalesced around him to grapple his assailant. The fight had been over in seconds and both Ryan and Jeremy had just stood there in disbelief while Ryan panicked internally, the fear that Ichthis hadn’t been fully banished from his body filling his every thought.

Of course, after Jeremy dropped Ryan off at home that night, Gavin had immediately sprung into action to clean him of all the blood and hold him close to reassure him that everything would be ok, that they would figure out what happened – together. After a bit of experimenting, it seemed that Ryan could mostly control himself during his transformations, so Geoff had deemed him still fit for active duty and had assigned him extra training to make sure that he wouldn’t be a danger to the rest of the team. Gavin helped with that too; his own experience with being Marked by an entity gave him distinct qualifications.

Over time, it became easier and easier to control his changes and Ryan was able to use them to his advantage on cases, his enhanced speed, senses, and practically weaponized body made him a formidable Hunter. He would still dream of the ocean, sometimes, but he was no longer afraid, not since he gained his own identity beyond simply being used as a vessel for an unimaginable horror. It didn’t hurt that he was surrounded by friends that cared deeply for him and who trusted him with their lives, something that Ryan took as seriously as his own freedom.

“If I were an infected necklace, where would I be?” Jeremy mumbled as he stepped around Ryan to start rummaging through a large, dilapidated wooden desk on the other side of the ruined room.

Cringing, Ryan wiped his hands on his already dirty pants and walked over to a nearby shelf to start his own search. “Knowing these freaks, probably hidden away in a bunch of disgusting hidey-holes or something.”

The two of them took their time in going through the small office they were in, gathering up the jewelry they’d originally come to collect; they carefully used forceps and tweezers to pick up each item and put them in opaque sealable baggies, the thick green fluid seeping out of every gem facet clinging to the tools. Ryan hadn’t been entirely wrong about their locations either – several of the pieces were buried in worm-filled holes under half-rotten floorboards, and at least one was contained in a vase filled with stagnant water that smelled like stinky fish.

“Alright, I think that’s all of them,” Jeremy declared about ten minutes later. “Let’s get this show on the road; I wanna get home and take the longest shower in history.”

Ryan, whose extra eyes had long since closed and tongue shortened to a normal length, pulled out his phone to take a few final pictures and then text the interns to come and clean everything up. “That definitely sounds like a good idea to me.”

Jeremy lightly punched him in the arm. “Yeah, and you still gotta find a way to explain your clothes to Gav.”

“Don’t remind me,” Ryan responded with a grimace.

It was, all in all, a very successful Hunt.

……..

“Two teaspoons of fresh basil, one teaspoon of thyme...”

Whenever Gavin cooked by himself, he would talk as if someone was there with him. Ever since Ryan had taken it upon himself to show him how to cook, Gavin had gotten used to chatting while making dinner together. It had quickly become one of his most favorite things to do in the world and he looked forward to it when they had the time. Nights like tonight, however, when Ryan wouldn’t be home till late, Gavin would still cook dinner for the two of them but he would brew himself a cup of tea and chatter at the food instead. It wasn’t so bad since he knew Ryan would be back soon.

Gavin looked at his watch – eleven thirty; Jeremy and Ryan would have hopefully finished up by now, though he knew from experience that sometimes cases could run much later than planned. And though he’d long since stopped being hyper-anxious when his partner was out on a case, Gavin still carried a small kernel of doubt deep in his chest that would remind him that things could go terribly wrong no matter how prepared or capable someone was. He believed so strongly in Ryan though, his confidence in the older man a driving force behind his calm demeanor when they weren’t together.

As if summoned, the front door to the flat unlocked and opened. Gavin didn’t look up from his simmering pasta sauce as he heard it close and lock once more, just listened as shuffling footsteps made their way into the kitchen.

“About time you showed up,” Gavin called over his shoulder. “Hungry? I’m making spaghetti, should be done in about ten minutes.”

“Sounds good,” came the mumbled reply from a very tired-sounding Ryan. “Might take a shower first though.”

Gavin smiled to himself. “What? The Rot give you trouble? I told Jeremy that house was going to be a disaster – I’m still surprised the roof hasn’t collapsed yet!” He paused, a though occurring to him. “It didn’t fall on you, did it?”

Ryan shuffled his feet but didn’t make a move to come closer or head to the bathroom. “No, nothing that extreme.”

“Hmm,” Gavin responded, his suspicion growing; Ryan always greeted him better than this, usually with at least a strong hug. “What, no hello kiss? No ‘ _honey, I’m home_ ’?”

“Uhhh,” came Ryan’s unintelligent reply.

Turning of the stove, Gavin finally turned around. “Alright, what’s going-” He snapped his mouth shut and practically glared daggers at Ryan’s blood stained shirt. “I mean, I’m not particularly shocked but come on Rye, this is the second one this month!”

At least Ryan had the decency to look guilty, his completely blacked out eyes staring directly at the tiled kitchen floor. “Forgot to bring a change of clothes.”

“I can see that.”

Ryan looked up at Gavin through thick eyelashes. “I’m sorry?”

“You’ll be forgiven when you can get those stains out.” Gavin said while rolling his eyes. He walked forward and placed a hand to the side of Ryan’s face, annoyance already fading away. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” Ryan assured. He turned to press his face further into Gavin’s palm.

 _At least he’s managed to get most of the blood off his face this time_ , he thought as he kissed Ryan’s cheek. “Shower. Now.”

The older man didn’t argue, just nodded his head and starting walking down the hall. Gavin sighed and looked back at his unfinished pasta sauce wistfully, knowing he wouldn’t be completing it tonight; he put a lid on the pan and shifted it off the hot burner to deal with later.

He followed Ryan into the bathroom where the other man had already stripped himself of all his clothing and dumped them in the hamper. The shower was on full blast, steam slowly starting to spill into the room from behind the glass door, and Ryan was stepping in. Gavin quickly divested himself of his own clothes and slipped in after his partner.

Sharing a shower wasn’t a rare occurrence for the two of them; they frequently enjoyed each other’s company while getting clean. Gavin especially liked to use this time to not-so-discretely inspect Ryan for injuries or new changes after he went out on hunts. Fortunately, tonight there was nothing out of the ‘ordinary’ – just the usual extra sharp teeth and dark eyes. Sometimes, if he was being honest with himself, Gavin wished that those teeth wouldn’t go back to normal. But he kept that to himself.

He made quick work of the blood that had seeped through Ryan’s shirt to stain the skin beneath, ruddy water running down the drain completely ignored. Taking extra care to scrub out any and all extra debris, Gavin washed Ryan’s hair while the other man brushed his teeth to remove any last trace of the Overtaken’s blood in his mouth. Even when they were both finished, they stood there under the rush of hot water, bodies close together and calm, arms wrapped around each other.

“Time for bed, I think,” Gavin eventually mumbled against Ryan’s shoulder as he disentangled himself to exit the shower.

Ryan grumbled but followed suit, the bathroom now clogged with steam. They dried off and wrapped their towels around their waists, Gavin pulling out his own toothbrush to prepare for bed. Ryan slipped his arms around the Brit’s middle and tucked his chin over the younger man’s shoulder, his eyes closed in contentment. When Gavin was done, he placed a chaste kiss against Ryan’s temple before pulling away once more.

They both rushed to get to their room, the cool air of the flat chilling them after their exit from the much warmer bathroom. Damp towels were flung onto the floor as they quickly crawled under the thick covers of their shared bed with no light but that which filtered dimly through the window blinds from outside. Gavin curled himself into Ryan’s side with familiar ease. Only when they were both comfortably snug did Gavin bring back up the topic of the Hunt.

“So how’d it actually go tonight” He asked quietly, his hand splayed on Ryan’s chest just above where his heart beat steadily.

Ryan hummed thoughtfully. “Pretty well, I think; we got the Rot jewels, which is what we went there to do, so...” He huffed a short laugh. “Coulda done without the messy bit at the end though.”

“Yes, I would agree with you on that one,” Gavin said with a smile.

The other man made an indignant noise in the back of his throat. “It’s not like I purposefully go in planning on transforming-”

Gavin interrupted him by leaning up on his elbows and kissing him, shifting till he was almost completely laying on top of Ryan. “I meant the shirt, love.” He kissed him again, this time slower and sweeter than the last. “You know I just like teasing you.”

“Yeah yeah,” Ryan mumbled with false exasperation. “You must think I do it on purpose at this point, huh?”

“I do think you’re a bit of a disaster, yes-”

“Thanks for that.”

“-but you’re _my_ disaster. My big, scary, _monstrous_ brute.” A deep flush spread over Ryan’s face and chest and Gavin was once again reminded of how he would never get tired of having this kind of effect on his partner.

“You’re being ridiculous again,” the older man accused with absolutely no actual signs that he was bothered in the slightest.

Gavin laughed softly, lips lightly skimming Ryan’s as he spoke. “I know but I like doing it – you’re so beautiful like this, I can’t help but say something.”

The corner of Ryan’s mouth twitched up. “Even the shark teeth and creepy eyes?”

“ _Especially_ the shark teeth and creepy eyes.” Gavin  kissed  him several more times, his hands tangled in Ryan’s damp hair. “Everything about you is so beautiful, Rye.”

Ryan fully smiled at that, crooked and honest. “God, I love you so much.”

And yeah, sometimes they argued and had little spats about this and that and yeah, they still had their own individual struggles that they were dealing with, but there was still no other person in all of infinity that Gavin could see himself wanting to be with more than Ryan fucking Haywood. There was nowhere else that Gavin felt safer than right where he was within Ryan’s strong but gentle embrace, skin electrified wherever they touched. Nothing was more important than the way Gavin’s heart swelled at the mere sight of the other man, how even the slightest smile could light up his entire world.

He hadn’t felt drained after touching Ryan since the attack on the Archives. Gavin suspected it was because the dark seed was no longer inside Ryan, sucking up energy and poisoning the body it was in. Instead, holding and touching and kissing his partner was an almost holy experience, one that filled him with comfort and peace like he’d never known. He’d never thought he’d be so addicted to the physical contact of another person yet here he was, constantly craving it like a starving man.

Gavin was willing to risk everything if it meant he could protect this man forever, could live by his side and experience the world together. He’d never thought of himself as a poet but Ryan had him thinking in flowery language and seeing things in entirely different lights. Gavin was a better man for having met Ryan and  he was proud of that fact. They made an incredible team, after all.

They loved each other, wholeheartedly and without reservations, ready and willing to shout it out for everyone to hear but more than happy to fill just the square footage of their apartment with it.  And that –  _that_ was the most perfect thing of all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we are, folks! This is the very very end of this crazy long journey. I hope you've enjoyed reading Bloodlines just as much as I did writing it. It was a labor of love and I'm actually quite proud!
> 
> I still can't believe we got this far and how many freaking WORDS there are! It still blows my mind. Can you believe I was only planning for like 25k? What a fool I was. J tried to warn me but I didn't listen.
> 
> As always, I want to thank the incomparable [shineelocket](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shineelocket) for being the best beta EVER - you're amazing, I am so thankful for you.
> 
> A massive hug to [jaysta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaysta) for being an incredible friend and cheerleader; I love you!!
> 
> And a final thank you to everyone who has read, given kudos, and/or left a comment; you guys are the real MVPs! <3
> 
> I'll see ya'll around for my next big project!

**Author's Note:**

> You know the drill: find me on [Tumblr](http://toasterness.tumblr.com) and yell at me, I love hearing your thoughts and ideas.
> 
> Comments feed my soul <3


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